Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Transgender’

Wisconsin Children’s Hospital Is Stacking Its Bench of Chaplains with Trans Activists

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 28, 2022

chaplain holding an open bible with hospitals and doctors in the background — **Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.**

Author Kylee Griswold profile

KYLEE GRISWOLD

VISIT ON TWITTER@KYLEEZEMPEL

Children’s staff members were first notified of such new hires when fliers were posted around the inpatient units advertising, “Meet Your New Chaplain: Kate Newendorp.” The first tip-off to Newendorp’s beliefs about the sexes was featured prominently on the posters, with a proclamation of her pronouns as “she/her/hers” and those of her fiance, a female who goes by “they/he.”

“Working in a pediatric hospital is a dream come true!!” Newendorp is quoted on the flier. “I am so excited to be working alongside everyone and am pumped to be part of the team. Think of me as your friendly next-door neighbor!”

The poster is just your garden-variety job announcement, but a deeper dive shows that Newendorp’s social Marxist views aren’t confined to a push for preferred pronouns. The new chaplain is all-in for transgender surgeries, abortion, and a rejection of religious teaching when it cuts against her personal comfort.

Despite biblical Christian doctrine affirming the sanctity and humanity of life in the womb, the existence of only two distinct sexes, and the immorality of same-sex relations in both the Old and New Testaments, the new “chaplain” proudly rejects all of this.

“Love Jesus. Be gay. Get ordained,” she wrote on Facebook in June, with pictures of herself in rainbow garb. “What better way to celebrate Pride than being ordained?! Many thanks to my church and classis for being willing to stand for queer folks being included in ministry and for allowing me to follow God’s call.”

Several months later, on Oct. 17, 2022, after announcing her engagement to her female fiance who identifies as transgender, the Children’s Wisconsin “chaplain” spouted off about her church online. “Also, your casual reminder that my validity as an ordained minister is currently under review by my denomination because of the love I feel for my fiancé. Do better Church, because I’m not going anywhere. I was called,” she wrote.

Newendorp doesn’t just reject biblical relationships in her own life; she’s a full-fledged left-wing activist who twists religion to advance her preferred leftist policies. Her Twitter bio announces that she’s a “Chaplain desiring to shake things up” and says she’s “Daydreaming about … a time where God isn’t referred to with male pronouns.” On Facebook, she shared a blasphemous poem called “Jesus at the Gay Bar”:

But she’s also used her religion card to proclaim that loving your neighbor looks like “getting vaccinated and masking up” and voting for Democrats, and that “Abortion is a religious freedom.”

“People of all genders and sexualities have and need abortions. Abortion is healthcare,” Newendorp wrote with misinformation about maternal deaths. “I am an ordained minister who supports a person’s right to choose what is right for their life and their body. I am pastor [sic] who is pro-choice.”

In January, Newendorp started a GoFundMe “on behalf of Jennifer London” to help her fiance “Jensen” undergo a double mastectomy, known in the transgender-activist world by the euphemism “top surgery.”

Since moving to Wisconsin for her role at the children’s hospital, Newendorp appears to have become friendly with the other chaplains, posting pictures of herself going wedding dress shopping with fellow Children’s chaplain Ian Butts. This indicates Newendorp is not the only anti-Christian person installed in a religious role at the hospital to help families deal with life-and-death medical situations.

If Butts’ name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the chaplain who interrogated Children’s staff members who submitted religious exemption requests over the disastrous Covid shot mandate that left many hospitals dangerously understaffed. As part of the invasive vetting process, Butts grilled employees about their religious beliefs to determine whether their theology met his standards for being allowed their First Amendment rights and freedom to make their own medical decisions.

[READ: In Wisconsin, Hospital Shortages Aren’t From Covid, They’re From Vaccine Mandates]

As I reported in these pages at the time, “The questions included the specifics of the employees’ personal religious convictions and their vaccination record, with Butts pressing on what he considered to be contradictions. Two particularly leading questions regarded the specifics of how the employees would keep their patients safe without being vaccinated, implying a moral implication of refusing a vaccine, as well as how they could square working for a hospital that mandated something so contrary to their personal convictions as a condition of employment.”

“We have already seen that Children’s holds little value for respecting deeply held religious beliefs, given their recent COVID Religious Waiver Committee. But this feels like a step too far. This feels like they have actively recruited activists into this field to further their progressive agenda,” one former Children’s Wisconsin employee told The Federalist of the trans activist chaplains. “I think this situation really calls into question who do we want guiding the spiritual development of our children — especially children who are stuck in a hospital, isolated, sometimes alone, and extremely vulnerable and easily impressionable.”

Children’s also recently posted a flier for a “Spiritual Care Intern” named Meg Trimm, who demanded to be referred to by the third-person plural pronouns “They” and “Them.” This chaplain intern was “an LGBTQ+ community educator and LGBTQ+ teen safe space facilitator” who believes “a professional chaplain’s job is not to convert anyone or preach religion, but to empower each person to find and use the hope and resilience systems they already have.”

Like Newendorp, Trimm rejects biblical teaching such as the concurrent depravity and creation in God’s image of people of all skin colors to instead espouse the most radical of left-wing political and theological views. Trimm has shared numerous TikToks of herself “deconstructing my white supremacy,” explaining that “gender is infinite,” proclaiming, “God is TRANSGENDER!!!” and saying, “God has a purpose for your life, and it might be fricken queer!”

“I am deeply concerned with this new infiltration of trans activists into our chaplain and faith-based services,” the former Children’s employee told The Federalist. “We have already witnessed the erosion and lost of public trust in fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work and general mental health counselors due to the rise of activists in these areas. Now parents have to worry about this as well?”

Like other pediatric hospitals that have recently come under fire for mutilative transgender interventions, the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin advertises medical interventions and surgeries for children up to age 16, with no specified age the hospital deems too young. It advertises that its services include “top surgery” (meaning a mastectomy that mutilates a child’s healthy and developing breasts), wrong-sex hormones, and allegedly “reversible” puberty-blocking hormones, although that isn’t what the experts and “science” say.

While the National Health Service used to claim such gender-bending interventions were “reversible,” it has since backpedaled, admitting:

Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations. … [Gender-affirming] hormones cause some irreversible changes, such as: breast development (caused by taking oestrogen), breaking or deepening of the voice (caused by taking testosterone). Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility.

If health-care workers in the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin decide it’s “appropriate,” they prescribe puberty blockers to children at their first visit, even if they’ve never been evaluated by a mental health professional. And while the hospital says it doesn’t pump kids full of wrong-sex hormones on the first visit, it “can work to quickly start hormones at a follow-up clinic visit, usually within a few weeks.”

Furthermore, the pediatric hospital states on its “gender health history” form: “We offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients.” Andy Brodzeller, an external communication director for Children’s, failed to explain what “gender affirming Spiritual Support” means despite being asked repeatedly.

“Our chaplains are trained to support and engage families of various faith and personal backgrounds in a health care setting,” Brodzeller said in response to a Federalist inquiry. “They only interact with patients if specifically requested by a family. Families are also always free to seek the services of their own personal faith leader. Regarding your question about parental involvement related to care for gender diverse kids, parents and guardians are essential to all care decisions. Clear, informed consent of all parents/guardians is required before proceeding with all treatments.”

But with trans activist “chaplains” like Newendorp and Trimm stacking the pediatric hospital’s spiritual support bench, and a promise from Children’s to “offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients” (emphasis mine), people in the Children’s community are rightly concerned.

“We have many parents and families at Children’s who are deeply religious and hold traditional Judeo-Christian values. Will these new chaplains be able to serve the need of these families objectively?” the former Children’s employee added. “How will they properly support a grieving parent who is dealing with a child’s traumatic injury? How will they properly counsel a child who may be alone in the hospital due to a single parent working to make ends meet and maintain insurance?”

How indeed.

Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Category:

Family, Health, Political, Religion

Tagged with:

How Safe Are Your Parental Rights? It Increasingly Depends on Your Politics

BY: PAULA RINEHART | NOVEMBER 07, 2022

Mom and daughter holding hands on a porch bench — **If the issue at hand is your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily.**

PAULA RINEHART

Michigan voters will decide Tuesday whether children in that state can obtain puberty blockers at Planned Parenthood facilities without parental consent. Proposal 3 would also give Michigan children a constitutional right to be castrated or surgically sterilized — again, without the consent of a parent.

Parental rights have become a fiercely contested battleground. Historically, your right to determine what’s in the best interest of your child has gone without question. It’s the oldest, most fundamental liberty we know, enshrined in legal doctrine since 1690.

But too often today, ideology determines whether your parental rights will actually stand in court. If a parent opposes her child’s desire to pretend to be the opposite sex, courts increasingly treat that parent’s rights as expendable. The sexual confusion of children overshadows parents’ rights to remain in their children’s lives as a potent force.

In a courtroom down the hall, however, the rights of neglectful or drug-abusing parents are treated with kid gloves, under the theme of family preservation. Activist courts stand ready to protect your parental rights, but only when your narrative matches their own.

‘I’m God in this Case’

Less than a year ago, Abigail Shrier shocked readers with her story of a California judge who stripped a father of his parental rights because he showed insufficient support for performing irreversible medical procedures on his sex-confused son. These cases are popping up all around the country. Sexual ideology is becoming the governing factor in a child’s placement, trumping the will and the voice of a parent. In a state whose governor was elected on a parental rights platform, Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman brazenly introduced a bill that would charge a parent who fails to affirm a child’s “sexual orientation or gender identity” with a felony. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation that makes his state a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical procedures. Just make it to the Golden State … and there is nothing your objecting parents can do.

One case in the sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, provides some insight into how a parent can suddenly get framed as “the bad parent” in a custody battle, merely for questioning a child’s sexual confusion.

Sarah Schultz told me she spent more than a half-million dollars trying to retain joint custody of her 15-year-old daughter who first claimed she was bisexual and then began to question her sex. Schultz pled for a “wait and see” approach and for the right to have an influence in her daughter’s maturing adolescence. Despite Sarah’s ex-husband’s earlier fentanyl overdose, she says, a judge gave primary custody of the daughter to her dad, who permitted both bisexual and heterosexual sleepovers. In the past four years, Schultz has seen her daughter fewer than five times.

Schultz said the appointed guardian ad litem viewed her faith as a threat to her daughter’s emerging sexuality. “I’m God in this case,” Schultz recalled her daughter’s guardian ad litem saying. The court saw her daughter as a girl in an “authentic process to discover her identity,” Schultz explained, while the father was commendable because he was “allowing her sexuality to blossom.”

Courts often use the “safety of the child” as a guise to award custody to a parent who mirrors the left’s narrative. Note the irony here. How can you be a good parent unless you are willing to oppose something harmful your child thinks she wants at the time? A teenager sees hormones and irreversible surgeries as a mirage of liberation. A concerned parent sees what a disfigured body and the inability to have children will mean 10 years from now.

A Pernicious Double Standard

Treatment of parental rights in the world of foster care and adoption, meanwhile, is a vastly different story.

A mother can give birth to a baby who spends two months in the NICU, crying for endless hours as he detoxes from the heroin his mother ingested during pregnancy, and she or her mother can still take the baby home. Parental rights are treated as sacrosanct, even though most of the maltreatment of children actually occurs at the hands of parents or their paramours.

“Family preservation” is the holy grail courts and welfare agencies pursue, often at the expense of the actual safety of children. As Naomi Schaefer Riley explains in her book, “No Way To Treat A Child,” “child welfare workers and family-court judges … believe that foster care, to the extent that it should be used at all, is an endless holding pattern for a child while parents get their affairs in order.” Sadly, many never do.

In an effort to preserve parental rights, children languish in care for years. The common complaint in foster care is “the clock.” Though a child is legally eligible for adoption after roughly two years in care, drug-abusing parents can play out the clock, attend a few recovery meetings, fulfill a requirement or two on the reunification plan — and the clock starts over. Many children age out of the possibility of adoption because the court favors parental rights over children’s attachment needs.

The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights

Given the current capricious approach of many courts, the question to ask is: Just how safe are your parental rights? If the issues at hand are related to your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily. But if the court frames those rights as a matter of “family preservation,” they are nearly carved in stone.

The contrast between how parental rights are viewed, depending on the left-wing bias of courts and state agencies, should disturb everyone. The right of conscientious parents to shape their child’s life is among the most cherished of all human freedoms. That right is increasingly threatened, as the militancy of transgender ideology invades the private realm of parent and child.

How safe are your parental rights then? Only as safe as the left wants them to be.

Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Florida Votes To Ban Sex Change Procedures for Minors After Volatile Testimony

By SARAH WEAVER, STAFF WRITER | October 28, 2022

Screen Shot 2022-10-28 at 2.42.42 PM — **Screenshot/TheFloridaChannel**

The Florida Board of Medicine has voted to ban sex change surgeries and hormone therapy for children under the age of 18 after hours of deliberation and testimony Friday. The guidelines, first released April 20, 2022, state that anyone under 18 cannot receive hormone therapy or puberty blockers. It also bans “gender reassignment” surgery for children and adolescents. The Florida Medical Board released the guidance in response to guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services endorsed sex change procedures for teens.

The state surgeon general endorsed the move in June and called on the medical board to, “review the Agency’s findings and the Department’s guidance to establish a standard of care for these complex and irreversible procedures.” (RELATED: Leading ‘Expert’ On Transing Kids Forced To Add Multiple ‘Corrections’ To Major Study)

The vote came after the board heard testimony from several individuals who had DE transitioned. One such individual, Chloe Cole, said she decided to transition after being “introduced to inappropriate content, and an echo chamber of far-Left ideology, such as that sex and gender are separate, women are inherently victims, men are inherently superior, and that dysphoric children need hormones and surgery in order to live.”

BREAKING: The Florida Board of Medicine has voted to ban sex change "treatments" for underage children.
— Sarah Weaver (@SarahHopeWeaver) October 28, 2022

“Few medical issues are more contentious than the question of medical treatments for minors who may or may not have gender dysphoria. Those children deserve the utmost compassion, which starts by treating them as individuals, not as enlistees in a cause,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Chairman of Do No Harm, an organization dedicated to depoliticizing healthcare, told the Daily Caller. “Compassion also requires basing care on rigorous scientific inquiry, not on dubious, agenda-driven studies or the demands of activists.”

"Over 2 years post-op…my nipples leak fluid and they stain my clothes. I have no breasts. I want to be a mother some day and yet I can never naturally feed my future children. My breasts were beautiful and now they have been incinerated for nothing." – @ChoooCole pic.twitter.com/M4toFQc0Wx
— Sarah Weaver (@SarahHopeWeaver) October 28, 2022

Other detransitioners took aim at puberty blockers, which some claim are a harmless method for teenagers to explore their gender. A study released earlier this month revealed that 98% of those who receive puberty blockers go on to receive sex change treatments such as surgery or hormone therapy.

Parents of transgender youth who supported sex change treatments for children also testified at the hearing.

Chaos erupted as board members announced an end to speaker testimony, and gave attendees an email to submit testimony into the public record. As board members filed out before returning to vote, protestors screamed “Let them speak! Let them speak!”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Trans Activists Offer Gender-Confused Minors Cash And Uber Rides To Get Them Away From Home

BY: STEPHANIE LUNDQUIST-ARORA | OCTOBER 27, 2022

screenshot of Discord messages — **‘We can pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if you need to leave immediately,’ wrote one Pride Liberation Project leader to adolescent members.**

STEPHANIE LUNDQUIST-ARORA

From coast to coast, transgender activists are working to push chemical castration and genital mutilation on minors at all costs. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 into law, blocking officials from enforcing other states’ laws that hinder access to transgender medical procedures and drugs for minors.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Pride Liberation Project (PLP) is organizing resources to help confused minors whose parents are not supportive of their gender and/or sexual identity experimentation to run away from their homes to stay with a “queer-friendly” adult. The potential for predatory behavior with this initiative is alarming.

PLP leader, Aaryan Rawal, now a college student, does not seem to be concerned about the risks of sending confused children into strangers’ houses “within 1-2 days” of their separation from their families. He sent messages to PLP members, mostly high school and middle school students, that the organization could offer rides and money promptly.

As reported by Asra Nomani, on July 15, 2022, Rawal wrote on Discord, “We can pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if you need to leave immediately. … In the short term, we can provide a couple of hundred dollars … through Venmo or Zelle.” For the longer term, he offers more money. “We can also set up a dedicated ActBlue fundraising page for you and get allies to donate. In the past, this has led to thousands of dollars in donations. All of this money is yours.”

At best, PLP is helping children run away from home. But it seems there is a sinister drive behind this network. Children are among our society’s most vulnerable, and those confused and separated from their parents are ripe prey. It is suspicious that identity disagreements within families, notably during this era of the social contagion of gender dysphoria and confusion — particularly among middle schoolers, would ever justify removing children from their families and placing them with strangers. Would these same actors argue that we take away a 13-year-old conservative girl from her liberal parents who refuse to affirm her political identity and place her with a random identity-affirming adult male stranger?

This is illegal and absurd. Saying so is common sense, not bigotry, as members of groups like PLP and Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Pride suggest on social media. These groups are manipulating the political landscape to obliterate parental rights and push transgenderism on children — even in elementary schools.

On its website, PLP boasts that it has advocated for the books “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” to remain in public school libraries. Its members have promoted compelled speech (via mandatory pronouns). Multiple PLP members spoke at a July 2022 Fairfax County School Board meeting in favor of proposed changes to the Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum that include lessons on transgender transitioning as early as fourth grade and co-ed FLE instruction to make students who identify as transgender feel more comfortable.

Arguably not by coincidence, the students who spoke at the board meeting all carried the same message: “Queer” students feel frightened and depressed. The PLP speakers repeatedly cited 50 percent as the community’s depression rate and suggested that changes to the FLE curriculum would help them feel supported. Their messages were so consistent, in fact, it would not be surprising if someone else wrote them.

On Sept. 25, 2022, Rawal sent PLP members detailed talking points and provided media training for the student walkout that occurred later that month. The walkout was meant to object to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to preserve parental rights and roll back Ralph Northam’s heavily politicized “Model Transgender Policies.” Rawal encouraged students to say that these efforts would “hurt Queer students,” “erase [their] existence,” and cause depression and potentially suicide.

In Q&A forums with PLP walk-out participants, Rawal further told a student who was not permitted to hang flyers in the school to proceed. “My honest response is do it anyway. Admin won’t penalize over flyers distributed manually…” Rawal also offered reimbursements of up to $25 for walkout expenses. When he realized he needed megaphones for the walkout and nearby stores were sold out of them, he wrote “f—, let me dm rigby.” Notably, Robert Rigby, a retired teacher and co-chair of FCPS Pride appears to be helping to organize and support PLP initiatives as well.

Adults organizing groups such as PLP are providing resources to help children run away from home. These minors, who are not permitted by law to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, could potentially travel to California — now a so-called “gender-affirming” sanctuary state — to obtain permanent and irreversible surgical procedures, and/or medication, without their parents’ consent.

These transgender ideology pushers are not simply accepting, they are aggressive in encouraging medical experimentation among children and keeping parents in the dark. Permanently scarring children behind a parent’s back is a particular kind of evil we will, hopefully, look back on in disbelief.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother, author, and member of the Independent Women’s Network.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

NHS backpedals on transgender treatments for minors, says most children are just going through a ‘phase’

By CANDACE HATHAWAY | October 24, 2022

**Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images**

Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP

In an astonishing turn of events, the National Health Services of England announced that most children who believe that they are transgender are just going through a “phase,” the Telegraph reported on Sunday. The publicly funded health care provider stated that it would take a more cautious approach when treating minors with gender dysphoria.

Doctors should not encourage children to socially transition, because transitioning is not a “neutral act” and it could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning,” according to the new NHS report.

The NHS also announced that it would ban prescribing minors puberty blockers “outside of strict clinical trials,” the Telegraph reported. Treatment for those under 18 years old will be heavily restricted.

In July, the NHS stated that it would be closing down the controversial Tavistock Centre, a gender identity clinic for children led by therapists and hormone specialists. Following an independent review, the gender dysphoria clinic received criticism for failing to collect data on puberty blockers and for taking an “unquestioning affirmative approach” to treating children with gender dysphoria.

Don’t miss out on content from Dave Rubin free of big tech censorship. Listen to The Rubin Report now.

Instead, the NHS will open two regional clinics based in specialist children’s hospitals led by medical doctors who are experts “in pediatric medicine, autism, Neurodisability and mental health.” The new clinics will follow guidelines that “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence.” Therefore, the NHS recommended that medical professionals should consider that a child expressing gender dysphoria might only be going through a “transient phase.” Doctors will be encouraged to take “a watchful approach” to monitor how a child’s gender dysphoria develops.

Going forward, the NHS will no longer recommend that medical professionals urge children to change their names or pronouns. Instead, socially transitioning will be recommended only in cases in which the child “is able to fully comprehend the implications of affirming a social transition” and in which a social transition may likely prevent “clinically significant distress.”

“The clinical approach has to be mindful of the risks of an inappropriate gender transition and the difficulties that the child may experience in returning to the original gender role upon entering puberty if the gender incongruence does not persist,” the NHS report stated.

Category:

Health, Political

Tagged with:

Detransitioners slam trans agenda in schools: ‘Children deserve better’

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter

**A sign outside a classroom taken in 2016. | REUTERS/Tami Chappell**

A group of detransitioners spoke at a recent school board meeting in California amid concerns about public schools exposing students to gender ideology, warning that such content increases the likelihood that minors will rush to embrace “irreversible” decisions to their long-term detriment.

Three young adults who formerly identified as trans spoke at a school board meeting for the Conejo Valley Unified School District in Ventura County, California, last week. Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old woman who has launched a support group for individuals who have come to regret undergoing gender transitions called Detrans United, was among three detransitioners who told their stories to the school board at a recent meeting.

Detrans United shared their testimonies on its Twitter account Thursday, noting that the purpose of their remarks was to “voice our concerns about their policies that allow confused children to come to harm.” Cole indicated on her Twitter account that the distribution of a book introducing 8-year-olds to the word “transgender” was the primary reason she decided to call into the school board meeting.

A couple of days ago, @OfficialAbelG, @catcattinson, and @ChoooCole spoke back to back at a @ConejoValleyUSD school board meeting to voice our concerns about their policies that allow confused children to come to harm. WATCH BELOW pic.twitter.com/3FN86Za45w
— Detrans United (@Detrans_United) October 13, 2022

Cole shared screenshots of the book, titled Call Me Max, which declared that although “transgender is a long word,” it “means something simple.” The book laid out how “trans means going across” while “gender means being a boy or girl or a little of both.” Another page of the book adds, “When a baby is born, a grown-up says, ‘IT’S A BOY!’ or ‘IT’S A GIRL!’”

Call Me Max embraced the idea that trans-identified children know that they were born in the wrong body from birth: “If a brand-new baby could talk, sometimes that baby might say, ‘NO I’M NOT!’ When a baby grows up to be transgender, it means that the grown-up who said they were a boy or a girl made a mistake.”

Will be calling in to give my public comment at a Conejo Valley USD board meeting. The meeting is at 6PST and I could be allowed my two minutes as late as 6:45PST. This was reading material given to an 8 year old student w/o parental consent. LINK—> https://t.co/hH0IPzag06 pic.twitter.com/l8wym6GBNZ
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) October 12, 2022

The school board meeting that Cole and the two other detransitioners called into was held on Oct. 11, which coincided with National Coming Out Day, an occasion that encourages LGBT youth to come forward about their sexual identities. One speaker addressed National Coming Out Day in her remarks.

“Growing up, I hated dresses and skirts. I hit puberty at 9 years old and I hated my developing breasts,” Cole recalled. “I hated growing into a woman. I didn’t identify at all with the women around me.”

Cole explained that her discomfort with her biological sex led her to decide that she “wanted to become a boy.” She began socially transitioning by adopting a boy’s name for herself, cutting her hair and wearing boys’ clothes.

“My parents were supportive but they weren’t sure what to do with me, so they sought the help of mental professionals who manipulated them into allowing me to do whatever I wanted to do with myself,” Cole said. She began to take puberty blockers at age 13, and had her breasts amputated at age 16.

Cole lamented the lack of time between her initial referral to receive the double mastectomy and the surgery itself, which amounted to six months. “Very quickly, I was given what I wanted but it was far from what I needed. Two years later, I was still suffering from major complications,” she added. While Cole did not specify when exactly she began to regret taking significant steps to change her gender, she elaborated on the long-term consequences of her hasty decisions.

“I will not be able to breastfeed any children I have in the future and my sexuality has permanently been affected because I was allowed to make adult decisions starting at 13, and then again at 15. This is what happens when children are sexualized and exposed to developmentally inappropriate and confusing content and ideas from a young age. This is what happens when we treat children like adults and expect them to have the mental faculties for proper long-term decision making.”

Cole concluded her testimony with a message to the school board: “You are placing children in direct harm. Children deserve better.”

A round of applause followed Cole’s remarks. After Cole finished speaking, another detransitioner, Cat Cattinson, began to outline her concerns about gender ideology in public schools in remarks delivered via telephone: “I was introduced to gender ideology when I was 13 years old. I began identifying as the opposite sex, a man, and believing this negatively affected me for the next 15 years.”

“For the record, coming out as gay is entirely different than coming out as another gender,” she suggested. Cattinson condemned surgeons who are performing mastectomies on underage girls, saying it’s an “irreversible procedure that will prevent this person from ever breastfeeding.” In addition to her status as a detransitioner, Cattinson used her experience as a molecular biologist to dismiss the central idea of gender ideology.

Cattinson added: “Humans cannot change sex. It’s impossible and trying to appear as the opposite sex comes with significant health risks such as infertility, osteoporosis and many more as well. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries are irreversible.”

As her remarks came to a close, Cattinson contended that “there is a serious lack of quality research that any of these interventions improve mental health or prevent suicide in the long term.” Like Cole, Cattinson’s remarks drew a round of applause.

Abel Garcia, a male detransitioner, also addressed the board to speak out against “the push that they are doing right now to our children with the transgender ideology.” Garcia stressed that “we cannot expect children as young as they are right now to believe that they can change their sex with cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries.”

Garcia detailed how he had breast implants at age 21. Implying that he did not have the maturity to make such a decision, the detransitioner told the board: “I cannot expect a child, a high school male or elementary child, to understand the full extent of damages that will be done to their bodies if an adult like myself wasn’t able to.”

For her part, Conejo Valley Unified School District Trustee candidate Lisa Powell insisted in a Twitter post shortly after the board meeting concluded that “CA state law requires schools to support and affirm transgender students.” “As a trustee, I will support and affirm our transgender students — not only because it’s the law, but because it’s the right thing to do,” she vowed.

CA state law requires schools to support and affirm our transgender students. As a trustee, I will support and affirm our transgender students – not only because it’s the law, but because it is the right thing to do.— Lisa Powell (@Powell4CVUSD) October 12, 2022

At the previous school board meeting on Sept. 20, a parent slammed the Conejo Valley Unified School District for its response to a seventh-grade boy masturbating in class. She attributed his inappropriate behavior to the school district’s sex education curriculum.

Conejo Valley USD board member justifies a 7th grader MASTURBATING in front of the entire class claiming it is not “anything outside the norm.” The boy was back attending school the NEXT DAY. pic.twitter.com/htrzt9ETcX
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) October 12, 2022

“It does not take an expert to figure out what happens to a 13-year-old boy when he’s staring at mostly naked girls wearing underwear to school and being exposed to concepts like oral and anal sex in seventh grade,” she said. “They let children write the dress code. The Teen Talk comprehensive sex ed is not age-appropriate and neither are supported by parents and teachers have spoken out adamantly against this.”

In a statement published Monday, the Conejo Valley Unified School District has decried what it has described as “on-going social media warfare and print disinformation campaigns” as part of an effort to “create false narratives from email snippets, social media posts, half statements made at Board meetings, and printed disinformation.”

According to district leadership, “What was once lively discourse at our Board of Education meetings during public comments and agendized topics has escalated to a concerted and organized effort to create chaos and further narratives that are unfounded and simply have nothing to do with current action items nor Board duties and business.”

Besides noting that district officials experienced death threats, the statement did not provide specific examples of actions it found troubling. It did, however, proclaim that the “sensationalizing of rumors and months-old reported incidents must stop,” in what appeared to be a veiled reference to the remarks at the Sept. 20 board meeting regarding the in-class masturbation that took place in May. District officials suggested that “these fictitious narratives are being wrongly used to politicize incidents involving our students.”

The Conejo Valley Unified School District crafted a fact sheet, which was last updated on Oct. 14, to respond to parental concerns about the sex education curriculum. It states that parents can opt out of the curriculum if they so choose.

https://player.edifi.app/embed/index.html#/channels/Generation-Indoctrination:-Inside-the-Transgender-Battle/27801

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

Category:

Education, Family, Political, Spiritual

Tagged with:

Michigan Is Hiding A Children’s Constitutional Right To Genital Amputation In Its Abortion Amendment

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | OCTOBER 12, 2022

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

In less than one month, if Proposal 3 passes, children will have a right under the Michigan constitution to walk into one of Planned Parenthood’s 12 so-called “gender affirming” facilities in the state and, without parental knowledge or consent, obtain puberty blockers. And with Planned Parenthood of Michigan promising “gender affirming” care “via telehealth in the coming months,” Michiganders’ kids won’t even need to leave their house to obtain these sterilizing drugs.

Passage of Prop 3 will also give boys a constitutional right to be castrated and girls the right under Michigan’s constitution to be sterilized by way of a hysterectomy or the removal of their ovaries — all without their parents’ consent.

Deceptive marketing by Planned Parenthood and far-left politicians, such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, hides this reality from Michigan voters, leading Prop 3 to be uniformly referred to as “the abortion amendment” even though the expansive language of the proposed constitutional amendment reaches far beyond abortion. And on abortion alone, notwithstanding proponents’ claims that “passing this amendment simply restores the same protections that Michiganders had for five decades under Roe v. Wade,” Prop 3 goes far beyond the controlling Roe-Casey precedent: If passed, the constitutional amendment would create an extreme regime in Michigan of abortion on demand, at any time, for any reason, without informed or parental consent, and paid for by taxpayers.

The expansive and legalistically worded language of Prop 3, crafted by Planned Parenthood and left-wing backers, however, extends beyond abortion to create a constitutional right to several aspects of what transgender activists call “gender-affirming care,” despite it being neither affirming nor caring. And Prop 3 extends that right to all individuals, including children.

This is not merely a political point, and it is not a worst-case-scenario argument based on how some liberal activist judge or justice might interpret Prop 3. This reality flows from the plain language of Prop 3 and rests on general legal principles of constitutional construction.

It’s Right in the Text

Here is the pertinent language Prop 3 would etch into the Michigan constitution as Article 1, Section 28, with the key language underscored:

“(1) Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care. An individual’s right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, burdened, nor infringed upon unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means. …

(2) The state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.

* * *

(4) For the purposes of this section:

A state interest is “compelling” only if it is for the limited purpose of protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.

* * *

(5) This section shall be self-executing….

Prop 3 Applies to Men and Women AND Boys and Girls

By its express terms, Prop 3 applies to “every individual” and guarantees an “individual’s right.” The proposed constitutional amendment further provides that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.”

As a matter of constitutional interpretation, then, the rights guaranteed by Prop 3 would be rights that both adults and children possess as “individuals,” and the rights apply equally to males and females.

This proposal represents a huge demarcation from controlling Michigan law, under which minors must have parental consent to obtain medical treatment or receive prescription medications, with the only current exception being the judicial bypass provisions governing minors seeking abortions. Specifically, Michigan law currently provides that to obtain an abortion, females under the age of 18 must have the written consent of one parent or legal guardian, but the law allows a girl to seek permission for an abortion from a judge, called a “judicial bypass.” A court must grant a judicial bypass if the judge finds either that “the minor is sufficiently mature and well-enough informed to make the decision regarding abortion independently of her parents or legal guardian,” or “the waiver would be in the best interests of the minor.”

In the context of abortion, Prop 3 guts Michigan’s requirements for either parental consent or a judicial bypass, first by declaring that the amendment applies to all “individuals” and second by expressly providing that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.” Treating females under 18 differently than those 18 or over is a textbook example of discrimination.

Section 4 of the amendment further cements the reality that minors must be treated equivalent to adults for purposes of the rights Prop 3 would establish. That section of the proposed amendment expressly limits the justifications allowed for regulating abortion or the other rights Prop 3 would inscribe in the constitution.

Under Section 4, the state may only regulate abortion and the other rights covered by the proposed constitutional amendment if it is necessary to “protect[] the health of an individual seeking care,” and “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

The rights of parents do not matter; Mom and Dad have no rights. And even the health of the girl does not matter because, under the plain language of the amendment, the state’s interest cannot “infringe” on the “individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

This legal analysis flows straight from the plain language of Prop 3, but case law from other states where a state constitutional right to abortion exists confirms this analysis. For example, in Alaska and Florida, courts have declared parental consent and parental notification statutes unconstitutional. And courts in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have struck parental consent statutes.

Prop 3’s grant of such “autonomous decision-making” is not limited to abortion, however. Rather, the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment provides that the right to “reproductive freedom,” “entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to … sterilization … or infertility care.”

Under Michigan law currently, minors cannot be chemically or surgically sterilized (or rendered infertile) without their parents’ consent, and even then most physicians would refuse to sterilize a minor — except in the case of transgender-identifying patients.

The modern medical community has embraced the transgender ideology that teaches that human beings can be born “in the wrong body,” and that the appropriate treatment for such individuals consists of making their bodies appear to conform to their “internal sense” of gender.

The first step in such wrongly named “gender-affirming” medical response consists of prescribing puberty blockers to children. Puberty blockers, at a minimum, render children temporarily infertile by preventing them from maturing sexually, and a longer-term use renders them sterile. The surgical procedures used under the guise of “gender confirmation” — castration, hysterectomy, and the removal of ovaries — likewise sterilize the patients.

In fact, it is this very destruction of children’s future fertility and the medical rendering of them sterile that has led to several states banning the use of puberty blockers and surgical “gender confirming” procedures on minors. For instance, in Iowa, the Legislature made these legislative findings to explain its proposed ban on puberty blockers and surgical procedures that sterilize children:

Puberty blockers prevent gonadal maturation and thus render children taking these drugs infertile. Introducing cross-sex hormones to children with immature gonads as a direct result of pubertal blockade is expected to cause irreversible sterility. Sterilization is also permanent for those who undergo surgery to remove reproductive organs[.] … For these reasons, the decision to pursue a course of hormonal and surgical interventions to address a discordance between an individual’s sex and sense of gender identity should not be presented to or determined for children who are incapable of comprehending the negative implications and life-course difficulties resulting from these interventions.

But in Michigan, if passed, Prop 3 guarantees children the right to “make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to … sterilization,” and without “discrimination,” giving boys and girls the right to obtain puberty blockers and surgical sterilization without parental notice or consent.

If passed, Section 4 of the proposed constitutional amendment will further guarantee that the Michigan Legislature cannot interfere in transgender minors’ decisions to obtain puberty blockers or surgical “gender reassignment” through castration, removal of ovaries, or a hysterectomy. That section, as excerpted above, provides that the state may only regulate such procedures for the limited purpose of “protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine,” and then, only so long as it “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

But the “accepted clinical standards of practice” by the supposed “mainstream” medical organizations is, at a minimum, to provide puberty blockers to children, with a steady movement toward the cash cow that is surgical interventions for minors.

Planned Parenthood Targets Kids One Way or Another

Again, these conclusions flow directly from the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment. But here the public would be wise to note two significant facts: Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan helped lead the ballot initiative to amend the Michigan constitution through the passage of Prop 3, deceptively described as the “Reproductive Freedom for All” amendment, and Planned Parenthood now represents “the second largest provider of ‘gender-affirming hormone therapy.’” In fact, less than two weeks ago, Planned Parenthood launched an ad marketing puberty blockers to minors.

What Planned Parenthood and its extremist political partners don’t want publicized, however, is that a “Yes” vote for Prop 3 will not merely make abortion-on-demand, for any reason, at any time, and without informed or parental consent the law of Michigan: It will guarantee that children have an unfettered “right” to “transition” by obtaining puberty blockers and surgical sterilization, parents be damned.

With less than one month to go before Michiganders cast their final ballots, little time remains to give proof to the left’s lie that Prop 3 is about codifying Roe. It is not. It is about sacrificing the children of the state — both born and unborn.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Category:

Family, Health, Political

Tagged with:

Newsom Signs Bill To Let California Strip Gender-Confused Teens From Parents — Even When They Live In Other States

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law Thursday night to strip rights away from parents who protest their children’s blind pursuit of destructive surgeries sold to confused minors as “gender affirmation.”

Under Senate Bill 107 introduced by San Francisco-area State Sen. Scott Wiener, California will now become a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical treatment for gender dysphoria. The legislation was supposedly aimed at blocking red states from enforcing laws barring extreme treatments for underage victims, and instead invited those minors to seek surgeries in California.

“In California we believe in equality and acceptance. We believe that no one should be prosecuted or persecuted for getting the care they need — including gender-affirming care,” Newsom said upon signing the bill into law. “Parents know what’s best for their kids, and they should be able to make decisions around the health of their children without fear. We must take a stand for parental choice.”

Except the bill undermines parental choice by empowering the state to strip custody from those who refuse to support their children’s demand for “gender-affirming care,” a euphemism used to describe something that is neither gender-affirming nor caring. Such procedures could range from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to surgeries leaving a child’s genitals permanently altered. The bill extends California’s reach beyond its borders, enabling minors in other states to pursue treatment on the West Coast away from parental oversight.

Jay Richards, a policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, and Emilie Kao, a vice president and senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, broke down the components of the law in Newsweek.

“California courts will have the power to strip custody from parents, wherever they live, who doubt the wisdom of these experimental and irreversible procedures — if their child so much as steps foot in California,” the pair explained. “It would also allow California doctors to treat minors still in other states. With the advent of telehealth, a child could get a prescription for hormones from a California doctor while at home in Arkansas or in Florida.”

Both states have instituted protections to restrict cross-sex hormones from ending up in the hands of gender-confused minors.

Under California’s new law, parents might not even know whether their children are pursuing these dangerous drugs and procedures. Senate Bill 107 mandates that doctors hide children’s medical information from parents if related to “gender identity,” even if requested by subpoena.

Last week, a coalition of organizations representing parents both in and out of state condemned the law’s reach with a letter to the governor.

“[Senate Bill] 107 makes California akin to the Pied Piper, enticing minor children nationwide to leave their families and run away in pursuit of harmful drugs and sterilizing surgeries, all of which cause irreversible harm to the minds, bodies, and family relationships of America’s precious children,” they wrote. “Children experiencing gender confusion need the love, support, and guidance of their parents. They do not need to be taken from their parents and rushed down a pathway which leads to a lifetime of medicalization and sterilization.”

This summer, researchers at the Heritage Foundation found that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.” The findings contradict a key argument among proponents of aggressive “gender affirmation” who claim minors denied permanently life-altering procedures are more likely to kill themselves.

“There is a 14% increase in suicide rates among young people by 2020 in states that have a provision allowing minors to access care without parental consent relative to states that do not,” explained Heritage Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene. “Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

Author Tristan Justice profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Colorado School Board Proposes Toolkit Suggesting Educators Hide Student Transitions From Parents

By REAGAN REESE, CONTRIBUTOR | September 29, 2022

US-CRIME-SHOOTING-COLUMBINE-EDUCATION-POLITICS — **(Photo credit JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images)**

A Colorado school board proposed a “gender expansive” toolkit that directs educators on how to address transgender and non-binary students, including keeping gender transitions a secret from parents, according to the Post Independent.

The Roaring Fork School Board in Carbondale, Colorado, heard public comment on Wednesday with plans to vote on the toolkit on Oct. 11, according to the Post Independent. The “Toolkit for Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive/Nonconforming Students” advises educators to keep a student’s gender identity a secret from their parents if the student wishes and to make changes to school records as they see fit. (RELATED: Parent Group Challenges School District’s Planned ‘Transgender Awareness Week’)

“We previously affirmed students’ rights without yet specifying supporting practices,” Roaring Fork School District Chief Of Student And Family Services Anna Cole wrote in a memo to the board. “We have since learned the importance of providing clear guidance and programmatic support and have heard requests from students and staff for more explicit procedures. The toolkit is our response to these requests.”

The toolkit suggests a “gender tree” to explain gender identity and calls the soil, “societal influence,” which is the way “social, cultural and institutional influence” shape “gendered individuals.” Included is “fluidity and history” as the “rings of the tree” to represent a person’s “deeply-felt sense of gender” that can expand beyond man and woman to “genderqueer and agender,” the toolkit showed.

Under the “toolkit,” educators are advised to allow students to use whichever restroom and locker room corresponds with their gender identity. On overnight trips, students should receive accommodations “on a case-by-case basis with the goals of maximizing the student’s social integration.”

“It’s one thing to identify as a gender, but quite another to compel others to use special pronouns, and to open bathrooms and locker rooms to transgender students or allow transgender students onto sports teams of the opposite sex,” a board meeting attendee said to the Post Independent. “The rights of those not identifying as transgendered are being trampled.”

A Civil Union license is signed at a midnight ceremony in the Denver Office of the Clerk and Recorder, at the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building on May 1, 2013 in Denver, Co. Colorado is the eighth state to have civil unions or similar laws implemented, permitting unmarried couples, both gay and heterosexual, the ability to form civil unions and get similar rights to those of married couples. (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)

In Florida, a school board implemented a sexual education curriculum that links to Planned Parenthood documents and teaches 12-year-olds “all the ways pregnancy can occur.” An Ohio school is allowing educators to wear LGBTQ badges, despite parental pushback, in an effort to show students they are allies to the community.

The Roaring Fork School Board and Roaring Fork School District did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Teachers Refuse To Follow Trans Policy That Requires Them To Use Students’ Birth Names On Official Records

By REAGAN REESE, CONTRIBUTOR | September 29, 2022

US-POLITICS-EDUCATION-BIDEN — **(Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)**

Peter Doocy Wrecks Karine Jean Pierre And The FBI Goes After … Barron?

Teachers from a Pennsylvania school district are refusing to follow the district’s transgender policy, saying it deadnames, or disrespects, students’ gender identity, according to the Courier Times.

At least four teachers from Lenape Middle School and Central Bucks High School West, both in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, said they would not be following the district policy which requires educators to call students by the name and pronouns on their official records, according to the Courier Times. The district implemented the policy in September, which allows students to change their official record on a case-by-case basis.

“We’re not doing it,” Central Bucks High School West David Klein told the outlet. “If we adopt what they’re suggesting we’re putting a very, very fragile small minority of kids at a risk.”

Central Bucks West teacher Rebecca Cartee-Haring said all of the coworkers she talked to will not be following the policy, the Courier Times reported. At least two Lenape Middle School teachers said they will not be following the policy and know other educators in their building who will be doing the same.

The teachers in the middle school said not following the policy could cause them to lose their jobs, they told the Courier Times. (RELATED: TransTape, Chest Binders And Packers: The ‘Gender-Affirming’ Gear Public Schools Are Stocking Up On)

Grand Marshals wave from a float as they participate in the 2016 Gay Pride Parade march through downtown on June 12, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The mood was celebratory despite news of the mass shooting this morning in a gay club in Orlando, Florida. (Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)

Grand Marshals wave from a float as they participate in the 2016 Gay Pride Parade march through downtown on June 12, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)

In May, the school district required any political symbols to be removed from classrooms which included pride flags, according to the Courier Times. In July, a district policy was passed that gives the community the right to challenge any book held in the school library.

“If we’re going to, as a way of making it easier for some angry parents to control their kids, we’re going to by policy make it worse for the most marginalized in a school where we’ve already seen the negative consequences of this? No, we can’t,” Klein told the Courier Times.

In Virginia, students in nearly 95 schools walked out on Tuesday to protest Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed transgender policy which requires educators to call students by the name on their official records, which can only be changed with parental consent. The policy also requires students to use bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex rather than their gender identity.

The Central Bucks School District, Klein and Cartee-Haring did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

These Detransitioners Have A Message For Distressed Girls: Mangling Your Body Is A Sickness, Not A Cure

BY: JORDAN BOYD | SEPTEMBER 28, 2022

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

“The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters” is a cautionary tale that exposes not only how influential the spread of trans ideology is on social media and in doctors’ offices, schools, and therapy sessions, but also how that same ideology weaponizes vulnerable young women’s identity struggle against them.

The film from the Center for Bioethics and Culture documents the testimonies of three women — Helena, Cat, and Grace — who went through various forms of so-called “gender-affirming” prescriptions and procedures only to discover that the wrongly named “treatments” marketed to make them feel better about their bodies did more harm than good.

The featured women do not shy away from mentioning the irreversible procedures and damage this mutilative movement had on their bodies and souls, but they also don’t leave viewers feeling hopelessly doomed in a world that works overtime to normalize the destruction of healthy bodies.

Social Contagion

The documentary starts with the women explaining not just how they learned about transgender ideology but why it appealed to them.

“I don’t think anybody would have described me as gender nonconforming, or a tomboy or anything like that,” Helena admitted.

Though Helena said she never would have been considered “gender nonconforming” or even a tomboy, after hours of scrolling Tumblr, the social contagion of transgender ideology took root in her mind and began fueling her mental health problems.

“By the time I was about 13, I started to feel really depressed. I started self-harming. I started developing an eating disorder. That kind of isolation led me to go on Tumblr because I was spending a lot of time online generally,” Helena said. “I was introduced to a belief system that it had a lot to do with gender, but it was more like, ‘If you don’t fit in, that’s a sign that you’re trans. If you don’t like your body, that’s a sign that you’re trans. And if you transition, all these problems will be fixed.’”

Similar to Helena, Cat’s interest in “transitioning” was piqued when she was 13 after she visited a website boasting all things trans, prompting her to determine she had gender dysphoria.

Grace testified that she had “a lifelong like preoccupation and discomfort with my body” that turned out to be a “very normal sort of young adult female issues.” It’s not uncommon for children and young adults like Grace to feel uncomfortable in their growing bodies, but the vast majority outgrow their sex-related woes if left alone. For instance, in one Canadian study of boys with gender-identity disorder released last year, over time, nearly 88 percent of the subjects “desisted,” or abandoned their desire to identify as the opposite sex.

Grace, however, wasn’t left alone. After years of feeling “lost,” suicidal, and depressed, she jumped at the opportunity to alter her body. Grace also attributed her eventual decision to take testosterone and go through with a double mastectomy at 23, something she said she regrets, to “trans influencers” online.

“I was looking at trans influencers who had the body that I wanted and reading all of that stuff like the happy testimonials, also feeling the hysteria of the online trans community which was really freaking out because Donald Trump was president and they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be illegal to transition.’ It felt like it was a little bit of time pressure,” Grace said.

How could vulnerable young women not entertain the idea of “transitioning” when it is marketed as the end-all to their mental distress? Especially since it is plastered all over social media, and “doctors” advertising castration and mutilation get endless positive press coverage.

There’s plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that kids, especially girls, are heavily influenced by this shameless online trans peddling and the ideology’s popularity among their friends. That’s why “transition” procedures on U.S female adolescents alone quadrupled between 2016 and 2017.

The online world of trans ideology is so pervasive that when Grace began to question whether amputating her breasts was a wise decision, she admitted that she believed she was experiencing “internalized transphobia.”

As Helena explained, it was easy to get swept up into the world of “social justice ideology” with just a few taps on a screen:

In this social justice ideology, there’s kind of a hierarchy of who is the most oppressed versus who is the most privileged. The further along you are on the oppressed scale, that means you know that your opinion is listened to more. I found myself in this place where I had found the only community of other girls who are more like me in terms of personality. I could relate to them, but it was so enmeshed in this kind of belief system that made me feel really guilty about being a cis, straight, white girl. You begin to feel a kind of pressure to constantly apologize for yourself. “OK, well, how do I not be this privileged person anymore?” And one thing that’s really easy to do is just change your pronouns.

Changing pronouns, of course, was just the beginning. Eventually, Helena, Cat, and Grace all began taking testosterone.

Beyond the Screen

When Helena didn’t get the affirmation she wanted from her parents over her gender confusion, she sought help from her school’s guidance counselor and psychologist, both of whom were more than willing to push the teen to “transition” behind her parents’ backs.

“Ironically, one of the things that really kind of supported my idea of being trans was that before I was trans, none of the adults in my life at school or anything really cared that much. They didn’t really see that I was struggling. But when I said I was trans, then they all wanted to like bend over backwards to help me be trans,” she said.

Helena eventually found an in with a medical office that, after she requested it, prescribed her the maximum dosage of testosterone on her first visit.

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for public school officials to urge and aid kids who want to reject their sex. This is documented well on the Libs of TikTok Twitter account. But schools aren’t the only trans-crazed accomplices.

At 18 years old, Cat used Planned Parenthood, which has taken a recent interest in getting kids hooked on hormones, to get drugs that would make her look and feel more masculine.

“After just a 30-minute conversation, the doctor prescribed testosterone over the phone,” Cat said. “It was pretty clear she did not look at my chart, because she would have seen some things that would at least be cause for concern, because like I had a history of suicide attempts, I had been institutionalized before, I had been to inpatient eating-disorder treatment. The outcome of that conversation was, ‘Here’s your drugs.’”

As Abigail Shrier, author of “Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” once noted, “America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15.” And it’s hugely problematic.

At first, the young women saw what they believed was an improvement in their sex-related confusion and other problems.

“It did kind of feel like, you know, one of the better antidepressants that I’d ever taken in my life,” Cat recalled.

Eventually, however, Helena, Cat, and Grace all learned that taking drugs designed to inhibit their bodies’ natural functions was not the cure they’d hoped it would be. It ultimately left them feeling physically ill, angry, and even more depressed than before.

But in the case of Helena, who was on testosterone for 17 months, her health professionals never considered her symptoms to be a result of the male hormone. Instead, she was prescribed more medications to combat what her hospital’s psych unit deemed borderline personality disorder and psychosis.

“My life just became like a total disaster,” Helena said. “I wasn’t functioning at all. I wasn’t holding down a job. I wasn’t going to school. I just felt like a monster. Once I stopped the testosterone, the symptoms all went away and I started feeling like myself again.”

It was then that Helena gave up on the idea of doing surgeries, saying, “I just became so dysfunctional that I wasn’t really able to have the mental wherewithal to go through the process of calling surgeons, dealing with insurance.”

Cat, a singer, had plans to dive deeper into the trans world with a double mastectomy and legal name change but paused those when she realized “how detrimental the changes to my voice had been and how devastated I was that I had made irreversible changes to myself.”

Grace, who went through with her double mastectomy, experienced regret and the unnerving feeling that no matter how much she altered her body, “this will never be over for me.”

“I just was realizing that there might not be a light at the end of the tunnel like I thought there was. I also don’t really feel like a man, I just feel like a woman who has had her breasts cut off,” Grace admitted.

It was then that she began thinking about all of the irreversible damage her body was subjected to because she was told it was necessary to combat her gender confusion.

“I’m concerned that the testosterone may have affected my fertility and potentially will cause me some like infertility issues, but I really don’t know,” Grace said. “…I feel, I think more than anything else, regret over that. I just hadn’t been thinking about having children at that time. I didn’t think I really wanted them, and that’s something that I began to really want in my mid-20s.”

All Hope Is Not Lost

There were plenty of people, organizations, and resources available to Helena, Cat, and Grace when they first considered “transitioning,” but support for their “detransition” was severely lacking — so they started doing their own research.

“I started looking into a lot of studies, and what I found is that there actually isn’t much quality evidence supporting medical transition as the best treatment,” Cat said. “I started to grow concerned with scientific and medical misinformation being tried by the trans community.”

These young women found a way around the smokescreen with help from truthtellers such as Posie Parker, who ignored the threat of censorship from Big Tech to state hard and fast truths about sex.

“I went on YouTube, and I just searched ‘trans women aren’t women’ because I had never ever listened to gender-critical people or TERFs because I was just told they were hateful people,” Cat explained.

Helena found solace in talking to others like her who had started taking hormones and considering surgeries before waking up to the deception.

“I realized that like, oh, OK, there’s a lot of people going through this. It’s not just a handful of people. It’s like hundreds and thousands of people going through this. And so once I started meeting these people, I just started having conversations,” she said.

Those conversations are why it’s so important for young women like Helena, Cat, and Grace to share their stories.

“I’m really worried about other people who are getting sucked into thinking that gender transition is the answer to problems that would be better solved elsewhere,” Grace said. “I am hopeful, but I think it’s going to be a really ugly time. … The fallout is going to be really severe from all of the detransitioners. … But our voices can no longer be denied.”

Helena, Cat, and Grace will be labeled transphobic and hateful for speaking up, but their transparency offers a message of warning and of hope for real care that parents, policymakers, and people all around the world need to hear: Mangling healthy bodies is a sickness, not a cure.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Health, Political

Tagged with:

TransTape, Chest Binders And Packers: The ‘Gender-Affirming’ Gear Public Schools Are Stocking Up On

By REAGAN REESE, CONTRIBUTOR | September 26, 2022

2022 New York City Pride March — **(Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)**

Gay Pride Attendees Struggle To Define The Word ‘Queer’

K-12 school districts are implementing gender-affirming closets to provide students with products to help change their gender identity.
Items stocked in these gender-affirming closets include tucking tape, chest binders and stand-to-pee devices.
“An aspect of concern is that children see their peers getting special treatment and access to these closets, and that leads to developing resentment towards students with actual gender dysphoria, which could then lead to harassment and bullying, and even contribute to the social contagion we are seeing among our nation’s children,” No Left Turn In Education Chief Communications Director Yael Levin told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In a push to create a “safer and more inclusive” environment, K-12 school districts are creating gender-affirming closets, giving students access to chest binders, stand-to-pee devices and makeup to help students change their gender identity.

Libraries, children’s hospitals and LGBTQ organizations are partnering with school districts to provide money and resources to build gender-affirming closets in the public institutions. The materials provided to students aid them in gender transitioning by mimicking the other sex. (RELATED: 5-Years-Old Shouldn’t Learn About Sexuality, Gender Ideology In Schools, Majority Of Voters Say)

The Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City, Oregon, held a “Gender-Affirming Closet Donation Kickoff” in August to receive donations from the community for the gender-affirming closet at the local high school. The library asked for donations of tucking tape and chest binders in addition to bras and boxers.

“No Left Turn in Education is concerned by the trend of public schools across the nation offering gender-affirming closets for students that include products such as chest binders for girls and tucking tape for boys,” No Left Turn In Education Chief Communications Director Yael Levin told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Not only does this usurp parents’ rights, but it is practicing mental health gender-affirming medical care without staff being licensed mental health professionals and without parental knowledge or consent.”

Tucking tape is used to push “breast tissue flat” in order to create “chest masculinization” over time, according to the website for TransTape, a company that sells tape for gender transitioning. Tutorials are found online for different patterns and ways students can use the tape to bind the chest and “give the appearance of pectoral muscles.”
The tape can also be used to tuck male genitals to reduce their appearance, the TransTape website stated. The tape is water and sweat proof, allowing it to stay on for a few days.

Chest binders are a tank top-like item with “double panel binders” that come in nude colors to flatten the breast area, gc2b, a trans-owned company that makes chest binders, stated on its website. The binder is meant to match the color of the skin and hide a female’s breasts to give them a male appearance.

Binder exchange programs are offered for kids who want to transition but cannot afford to purchase a chest binder, the DC Area Transmasculine Society, a trans-led nonprofit organization, showed on its website. In order to be eligible to receive a free chest binder, applicants must have gender dysphoria that is caused by their chest and be unable to afford a binder.

“Chest binders can cause restricted breathing, break the skin around the edges of the binder, cause overheating and even bruise or fracture the ribs,” Levin told the DCNF. “Tucking tape can cause chafing, urinary tract infections, problems with urine flow and twisting of the testicles. Further research is needed to determine if tucking tape might lead to hernias and to infertility in boys.”

People in Pride colors attend and march during the 2022 New York City Pride March on June 26, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)

The Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago partnered with several schools in the city to provide LGBTQ resources such as websites for gender-affirming products. The website FtM Essentials, which sells gender-affirming items, has stand-to-pee devices, packers and packer holders.

Stand-to-pee devices are prosthetic penises “designed for standing urination” for females, according to the FtM Essentials website. Harnesses and tight boxer briefs are required to keep the devices in place and it is recommended that females try the device out in the shower first to learn how to use the device.

Females can also use packers, or a prosthetic penis, to give a “realistic bulge,” the FtM Essentials website showed. The packers come in different “colors, sizes and materials” for different ages of transitioning people. To keep packers or stand-to-pee devices in place, packing straps and underwear are available to keep the items “comfortable and discreet,” the FtM Essentials website stated. Some packing underwear come with a cup as an “enhancer” to help with packing.

“An aspect of concern is that children see their peers getting special treatment and access to these closets, and that leads to developing resentment towards students with actual gender dysphoria, which could then lead to harassment and bullying, and even contribute to the social contagion we are seeing among our nation’s children,” Levin told the DCNF.

Aside from items to give the appearance of having genitals of the opposite sex, gender-affirming closets contain makeup, fake eyelashes, jewelry and other clothing items like button-up shirts or leggings to allow students to dress like the opposite sex.

The “It Gets Better Project” gave out 50 grants of $10,000 each to schools across the country to create gender-affirming closets and start “Gender Sexuality Alliance” clubs in an effort to build “safer and more inclusive” environments in schools. Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, Missouri, is one of the schools that received a grant and put the money toward stocking the school with clothing, chest binders, bras, underwear and makeup for a gender-affirming closet.

“In many cases the advertised availability of such items in a school setting suggests a deliberate attempt to circumvent parental involvement,” Free To Learn Coalition President Alleigh Marre told the DCNF. “The distribution of these types of items without the express cooperation of the minor student’s family is completely inappropriate. Our schools should be focused on core competencies and academic achievement.”

The Driftwood Public Library, the “It Gets Better Project,” the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and the gender-affirming product companies did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Youngkin’s Crusade To Get Radical Gender Theory Out Of Virginia Schools Puts Kids And Families First

BY: CASEY CHALK | SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

Author Casey Chalk profile

CASEY CHALK

Last week, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin further delivered on his gubernatorial campaign promise to give parents more control over their children’s education. The Virginia Department of Education issued new model policies specifically directed at resisting the radical gender ideology that has become commonplace even in the Commonwealth’s elementary schools.

The New Model Policies

Virginia’s new model policies explicitly state that students’ participation in school programming and use of school facilities such as bathrooms or locker rooms should be based on their biological sex and that modifications should be offered only to the extent required under federal law. They also assert that students who are minors must be referred to by the name and pronouns in their official records unless there is explicit parental approval for the use of something else. And they also declare that schools may not conceal information about a student’s so-called gender identity from his or her parents and that parents must be given the opportunity to object before any gender-related counseling services are offered.

The document reads: “Parents have the right to instill in and nurture values and beliefs for their own children and make decisions concerning their children’s education and upbringing in accordance with their customs, faith, and family culture.” In a rebuke to those officials and administrators who have encouraged wrongly named gender-affirming “care,” it explains: “Parents are in the best position to work with their children and, where appropriate, their children’s health care providers.”

The new model policies are subject to a 30-day period for public comment that begins later this month. Following that period, in accordance with a 2020 state law, school boards across the Old Dominion must adopt policies that are “consistent with” those of the state’s Department of Education. Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Youngkin, noted that the updated guidance “delivers on the governor’s commitment to preserving parental rights and upholding the dignity and respect of all public school students.”

A Personal Anecdote

I can personally speak to how widespread the promotion of gender ideology has become, at least in Fairfax County, where I attended school for 12 years and then worked as a high-school history teacher. The very day after Virginia’s Department of Education issued this new guidance, my family attended a picnic in our neighborhood. My two eldest children (ages 9 and 7) were playing a game with other neighborhood kids, including, a bit awkwardly, a teenage girl who attends the local public high school. During the game, and when my wife and I were not nearby to overhear, this teenager told my children that she identifies as both a girl and a boy and that there are “72 genders.”

My wife and I homeschool our children. It wasn’t something I was eager to do — my extended family has been attending county public schools since the 1960s, and I was proud of my experience in FCPS 20 years ago. But I knew things had changed very dramatically in the last two decades, and I wanted to shield my children from ideas and behaviors that are not commensurate with their maturity. Simply put, prepubescent children don’t need seminars in gender fluidity and sexual experimentation. But over this past weekend, an FCPS-educated teenager took it upon herself to impart those ideas to my children.

As confusing as this was for my children — and as upsetting as it was to my wife and me — I do not level much blame at this teenager for taking away part of their innocence and forcing us to have conversations with our children about gender and sex we had been hoping to delay just a few more years. I blame FCPS teachers and administrators who welcomed this gender ideology in schools. And I blame smartphones and social media for proliferating these ideas with little parental oversight.

Protecting Our Children

Left-wing corporate media and Democratic politicians, of course, have been quick to attack Youngkin over his new policy. “Virginia has moved to restrict the rights of trans students in its public schools,” reads a mid-September headline from NPR. The Department of Education’s guidance “calls for the misgendering and outing of children in schools where they’re supposed to be safe. Absolutely shameful,” tweeted Virginia Democratic Del. Mike Mullin.

Think about the fact that in my kids’ very first interaction with a public school-educated teenager, she couldn’t help but share the confused, biologically inaccurate gender ideology she has been wrongly told is the most important part of her identity. That speaks to the pervasive nature and aggressiveness of this ideology and its adherents. Think about how many kids have had their lives thrown into chaos by adults who tell them they may be a boy in a girl’s body, “gender fluid,” or some other nonsense that may very well cause them permanent physical and emotional damage.

Thankfully, our kids trust their parents enough and have a solid enough understanding of what makes boys different from girls that we could have a brief, open, and hopefully instructive conversation about what they experienced on a neighborhood playground. Youngkin’s edict aims to ensure those conversations happen in the home, guided by loving parents, and less influenced by the confused ideology of bureaucrats who don’t have your children’s best interests at heart.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

The Transgender Movement Is Not Just Intolerant. It’s Barbaric and Violent, And It’s Coming for Your Children

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | AUGUST 19, 2022

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

Hardly a day goes by now that we don’t see another appalling example of transgender ideology’s aggressive intolerance in the public square. Recently, the target of that intolerance was an 80-year-old woman in the small town of Port Townsend, Washington, who was permanently banned from her local YMCA pool after she objected to a “trans woman” — a man — in the women’s locker room.

And for daring to speak out about that in public, she and her supporters were attacked this week in broad daylight by a mob of trans activists and Antifa thugs.

According a recent report in the New York Post, the woman, Julie Jaman, confronted a YMCA employee, a “trans woman” named Clementine Adams, in the locker room after Jaman observed that Adams was clearly a man. To Jaman’s credit, she did not mince words.

“I saw a man in a woman’s bathing suit watching maybe four or five little girls pulling down their suits in order to use the toilet,” Jaman told the Post. “I asked if he had a penis and he said it was none of my business. I told that man to ‘get out right now.’”

For exercising what would have been universally praised not long ago as guts and common sense — confronting a man trespassing in a women’s locker room to watch little girls undress — Jaman was accused of “being discriminatory” by the YMCA manager, threatened with the police, and ordered to leave. A member of the YMCA for 35 years, she was subsequently banned from the pool permanently.

Jaman’s ordeal wasn’t over, though. On Monday, Jaman and others gathered to speak out about the local YMCA’s dangerous policy of allowing men into the women’s locker room. As Jaman was speaking, a mob of Antifa militants, including burly, tattooed men, converged on the rally, screaming, “Trans women are women,” in an attempt to intimidate and drown her out. They ripped down the suffragette flags on display behind Jaman, who was visibly shaken and asked, “Are we going to get beat up here?” and asked supporters in the crowd to call the police.

The 80-year-old woman who was banned from her local swimming pool for raising concerns about a male in the female washroom was heckled as she gave a speech tonight.

Trans activists ripped down the suffragette flags behind her and tried to sabotage her microphone. #LetJulieSwim pic.twitter.com/LjHBFMfBHr
— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) August 16, 2022

Eventually, the Antifa mob surrounded Jaman, whose supporters, most of them middle-aged and elderly women, had to form a protective circle around her. Some women were thrown to the ground. Others had their shoes ripped off. Just as black-shirted Antifa men were beginning to tussle with Jaman’s supporters, the police showed up.

It wasn’t enough, though, simply to terrorize and physically assault women exercising their First Amendment rights. The mayor of Port Townsend, a self-described “pervert and deviant” named David J. Faber, praised the mob that went after Jaman and her supporters, calling it an “incredible night” that was “beautiful” and falsely claiming that “Trans and cis-allies alike spoke love & support.”

As copious video evidence posted on Twitter shows, they did no such thing. They engaged in the thuggish intolerance, simmering violence, and blind rage characteristic of the far left — and then they reveled in it, with the likes of Faber praising the mob for their brutality toward an 80-year-old woman who dared to speak up.

Mobs like the one in Port Townsend on Monday, however, are merely the blunt instrument, the Brown Shirts of a much larger effort on the part of the left to sever the relationship between parent and child and reshape society in a way that allows adults, especially adult men, to fulfill their every desire — often at the expense of children.

But that effort isn’t being led by black-shirted Antifa thugs, it’s being led by medical professionals at some of the most prestigious hospitals in the country. In recent weeks, Libs of TikTok, Matt Walsh, Chris Elston (Billboard Chris), and others have been posting publicly available promotional videos and other information from Boston Children’s Hospital touting so-called “gender-affirming care,” which includes chemical castration, mastectomies, hysterectomies, and genital mutilation performed on minors.

Boston Children’s Hospital (@BostonChildrens) is now offering “gender affirming hysterectomies” for young girls pic.twitter.com/JOH5fFtGJ0
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 11, 2022

Boston Children’s Hospital responded by removing all its videos and information about “gender-affirming care” from its YouTube channel and quietly updating its website to claim (falsely) that gender-related surgeries are only for those over 18.

Meanwhile, Big Tech and the corporate press predictably came to the defense of the hospital. Facebook banned Libs of Tik Tok this week, and NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny spread misinformation by claiming BCH doesn’t perform genital surgeries on minors. Almost all media coverage of the BCH affair has been framed as far-right activists threatening the hospital and engaging in “stochastic terrorism” when in fact all that Libs of Tik Tok and others have done is post the hospital’s own materials.

The videos are genuinely horrifying. A buttoned-up surgeon calmly explaining phalloplasty to the camera over whimsical music can’t hide the horrifying fact that what’s being described is the cutting off of forearm flesh from a healthy girl to fashion a non-functioning penis. It is barbaric in the extreme, and the attempt to make it sound mundane and palatable in these videos somehow only highlights the barbarity and cruelty of it.

Boston Children’s Hospital will cut off flesh from a girl’s forearm or thigh, and remake that into a non-functioning penis.

The first step is to remove her uterus. pic.twitter.com/FyFNh4g31V
— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) August 14, 2022

And it’s not just Boston Children’s Hospital. Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, has amputated the breasts of a 12-year-old girl and castrated a 16-year-old boy in the name of “gender-affirming care.” Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh promotes puberty blockers for children. The pediatric gender program director at Yale has admitted on camera she believes children as young as 2 or 3 can be eligible for medical intervention and treatment on their “gender journey.”

In other words, the people and institutions behind this movement are not fringe, they are not the pink-haired youths and black-clad Antifa thugs screaming at old ladies in the streets. They occupy the elite heights of American society. They have real power and influence.

And they are not just angling to get between parents and their children, they are angling to get healthy girls and boys onto the operating table. They are angling to get grown men into women’s locker rooms, bathrooms, shelters, and dormitories. They are angling to get Child Protective Services to remove children from parents who refuse to go along with transgenderism.

And if you object or protest in any way, they are angling to get you labeled a bigot, a threat to child safety, a terrorist. And you know what that means.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Is the Opposite of Gender-Affirming and Caring

BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | AUGUST 19, 2022

Author Nathanael Blake profile

NATHANAEL BLAKE

People don’t like hospitals that hurt children instead of healing them. Boston Children’s Hospital has been deluged with criticism after conservative activists highlighted its own materials promoting medical transition for minors. The hospital has tried to cover up its deeds, but it cannot escape the truth that so-called gender-affirming care isn’t. The euphemistic phrase conceals the brutal realities of medical transition, but these procedures — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and various surgeries — do not affirm patients’ gender, let alone care for them. Gender-affirming care is a lie and we must stop it.

The tide may be turning against the transgender craze. Across the pond, the United Kingdom’s infamous Tavistock pediatric gender clinic has been shut down, and a massive medical malpractice action has begun against those responsible for rushing children into transition. Here in the U.S., Republican politicians are increasingly willing to stand up against the radical transgender agenda, as even the spineless are realizing that this is a winning issue. And it seems only a matter of time until trial lawyers target America’s aggressive and unregulated gender clinic industry.

Thus, there is hope that regulations and lawsuits will curb the craze for rushing people, especially children, into medical transition. It is even possible to imagine a quiet climb-down in which the political left, and the institutions it controls, realize that radical gender ideology is a loser and sidle away from it. There have been a few signs that this is happening, such as New York Times articles questioning transgender orthodoxy.

Will Proponents Back Down?

But there are no guarantees of victory, in large part because many people may be in too deep to back down. Democrats in general, and the Biden administration in particular, have embraced transgender ideology. They have done everything from putting men in women’s shelters to using school lunch programs for poor children as leverage to force schools to adopt the rainbow agenda, including letting males into girls’ locker rooms. And, of course, pretty much every major left-wing group has followed the LGBT lobby into pushing a radical transgender agenda.

Nor is it only politicians and activists who have staked their credibility on the trans agenda. From education to entertainment to Big Business, a lot of people have embraced transgender ideology, including medically transitioning children. The medical industry in particular has a lot to lose, both in credibility and cash, if the transition train slows down. This may explain why pro-trans research is routinely published even though the studies are mostly low quality, with some being demonstrably terrible. The goal isn’t to publish good research, but to provide cover for an ideology that is chemically and surgically sterilizing children.

And, of course, there is pride — no, not the rainbow celebrations sponsored by big business, but actual personal pride. Will parents who bought into gender transition admit the harm they have done to their children? Will liberals admit not only that they were wrong, but that Christian conservatives were right? These and similar truths may be too hard for many to accept.

Consequently, we opponents of the transgender agenda must keep the pressure on. We must make sure that those in thrall to transgender ideology — from politicians to academia to the media to Big Tech and Big Business — either abandon it or are defeated. In doing so, it will help to show how the horrifying harms inflicted by gender transition are the result of denying the truth of sex and gender.

Gender-Affirming Care Is a Lie

Gender-affirming care is a lie because gender is not a free-floating metaphysical substance. Gender becomes nonsensical when disconnected from sex, because gender is the social expression of the biological realities of human sex. As Matt Walsh’s recent documentary “What is a Woman?” demonstrates, gender makes no sense without reference to biological sex — it either goes around in circles (e.g. a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman) or descends into crude stereotypes (e.g. a boy who likes pink must be a girl).

We are a sexually dimorphic species; the difference between male and female is essential to the continuation of humanity. Thus, though there is variation in gender expression between individuals, and gender expectations between cultures, gender always has to refer back to our embodied realities as male or female. Thus, there cannot be a gender identity that is deeper, more essential, or more immutable than our sex. And so it is impossible to have “gender-affirming” medical care that attempts to efface the reality of bodily sex.

There are people who are unhappy with their bodies and wish that they were the other sex. But they are not, nor can they become, the other sex — at most they can be chemically and surgically altered to resemble the other sex and attempt to socially live that role. These people need compassion and help in accepting their healthy natural bodies, not chemicals and surgery to contort their bodies into facsimiles of the other sex. Transition is never medically necessary, which is why activists encourage suicide threats from those who identify as transgender — they have to take themselves hostage because they are in no medical danger.

The ugly truth hidden behind the lying promises of “gender-affirming care” is that medical transition always inflicts physical harm for no physical benefit; it damages a patient’s body, rather than healing it.

Gender-affirming care isn’t, and it must be stopped.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Category:

Family, Health, Political

Tagged with:

War On Parents: Male Teacher Asked This Mom’s 11-Year-Old ‘Transgender’ Daughter to Sleep in Boys’ Cabin

BY: KELSEY BOLAR | AUGUST 10, 2022

Author Kelsey Bolar profile

KELSEY BOLAR

VISIT ON TWITTER@KELSEYBOLAR

At the beginning of the school year in 2019, Jennifer received an email from her daughter’s 5th-grade teacher. The teacher, a male, was using a different name for her then-10-year-old daughter. Jennifer thought it was a mistake. The teacher must have accidentally emailed the wrong parent. But then, Jennifer went to her daughter’s room and found a yellow Post-It note stuck to her dresser with that same name, along with the pronouns “they/them.”

“Do you have a new nickname?” Jennifer asked.

Her daughter responded yes.

Jennifer didn’t think much of it beyond harmless identity exploration. But a couple of months later, Jennifer received a more concerning call from a school counselor informing her that her daughter had used the words “suicide” and “cutting” with a friend. The counselor recommended her daughter start seeing a therapist who was contracted with the school. That therapist was free to use, accessible during school hours, and qualified to handle her daughter’s mental health problems, Jennifer was told. Worried about her daughter, Jennifer said yes. But because her daughter was only 10 at the time, Jennifer would have to go into the school and give written permission.

Jennifer lives in a suburb of Washington state, where children as young as 13 years old can access their own medical and mental health services without parental knowledge or consent. Parents in these cases are billed by insurance companies with no explanation of benefits, meaning they’re stuck with the tab but have no ability to know what services or treatments their child received.

When consenting for her daughter to see the school therapist, Jennifer made sure to tell the therapist that her daughter had been talking about her sexuality and gender identity. She shared that while she and her husband believed their daughter was too young to be exploring these ideas, they’d “love her no matter where she ends up.” The therapist made no mention of her own views on the subject or her affirmation-based treatment model where, if a child declares he or she is transgender or non-binary, the therapist would affirm the child’s stated identity.

So, for two and a half months, Jennifer’s daughter was meeting with a school therapist once a week who was treating her as a boy, using male pronouns and a made-up name. When Jennifer would ask how the sessions were going, the therapist acted as though nothing big had come up.

‘Coming Out’

Then in February 2020, right before COVID-19 hit, Jennifer received a phone call from the school therapist with a two-fold purpose: to request that she and her husband come to the school in three days for a meeting where the therapist would assist their daughter in officially coming out to them as a boy, and to obtain parental permission to allow her daughter to stay overnight in the boy’s cabin for an upcoming school trip.

Sensing the meeting wouldn’t go well — and worse, would set them up in an adversarial position with the daughter they loved — Jennifer and her husband called it off.

“We were never going to let her do that, I don’t care who she thinks she is,” Jennifer said. “There are so many reasons not to put a girl in a cabin with a bunch of boys and a male adult teacher. So many safeguarding fails.”

At that point, Jennifer and her husband decided to take more drastic measures. They were skeptical that their 11-year-old daughter was transgender and believed the school and the therapist were actually leading her to identify as a boy. So, they revoked their consent for their daughter to see the school therapist, took away her access to online devices, and soon, unenrolled her from public school altogether.

“I already knew I couldn’t trust the school with my daughter when she was in fifth grade,” Jennifer said. “And going onto the middle school, she would be turning 13. And then I wouldn’t even know. They wouldn’t have to tell me what was going on.”

Identifying as a Boy

Jennifer’s daughter first identified as transgender when she was 10 years old and enrolled in an online drawing program. Prior to that, Jennifer and her husband had restricted their daughter’s access to online devices. But since their daughter was an artist, they agreed to what they thought was a harmless online art program.

Yet, a year and a half later, Jennifer learned it was through that group of online art friends that her daughter was introduced to ideas of sexuality and gender.

“She talked about being asexual at 10 years old,” Jennifer said. “Which of course she’s asexual at 10 years old. But that’s an identity.” She then talked about being demi sexual, gay, non-binary, and finally landed on transgender.

The transgender identity was heightened when her daughter began conversing with a group of girls at school who, at ages 10 and 11 years old, also identified as some form of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. The friends appeared to compete over who could have the edgiest, most unique identity.

“She was trying to fit in. She was trying to have friends,” Jennifer said.

Once her daughter was out of school and no longer communicating online with peers who valued queer identities, her transgender identity lost its importance. Slowly, Jennifer said, her daughter started to let it go.

‘Wasn’t Making Her Happy’

“Her mood changed drastically,” Jennifer said. Identifying as transgender “wasn’t making her happy.”

Since giving up on being transgender, Jennifer has talked with her daughter about everything that happened over the year and a half she spent exploring identifying as a boy. After repeated unanswered requests, Jennifer also obtained notes from the school therapist, which confirmed her suspicion that the therapist was encouraging her daughter’s transition behind her back.

“I was so upset because [the school therapist] was using male pronouns for my daughter from the first moment, from the first notes,” Jennifer said. “He, him. And it seemed like all that she was doing with my daughter was helping her advocate for herself whenever somebody ‘misgendered’ her.”

This included Jennifer’s older two sons, who didn’t even know their sister was identifying as a boy. It also included a boy at the school who Jennifer said got in trouble for “misgendering” her daughter.

“At the school, they’re not just affirming and encouraging my daughter in this delusion,” Jennifer said. “It’s deluding other kids too. They are teaching kids to deny their own sense perceptions.”

More recently, Jennifer felt enough time had passed that she could ask about the idea of staying in the boy’s overnight cabin for three nights without feeling embarrassed or self-conscious.

Jennifer’s daughter told her, “That wasn’t my idea. That was the school’s idea. My teacher asked me.”

“Kids want to please adults,” Jennifer said. “My daughter felt she had to answer yes.”

After that incident, Jennifer said her daughter, who is now 13, decided she didn’t want to go on the 5th-grade overnight trip. Though it wasn’t then, it’s now clear to her why.

‘Going to War Together’

Jennifer feels betrayed by educators, therapists, doctors, and liberal politicians whom she spent a lifetime supporting. That list includes President Joe Biden, who told parents in March that affirming their child’s transgender identity is “one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.”

“A lot of people think that using the pronouns and affirming a child who says they’re the opposite sex, that that is about kindness,” she said, explaining:

Everybody’s very confused about this. Because the T has purposefully been attached to LGB, which is a completely separate issue. We know the LGB community was mistreated, and so people don’t want to do that again with trans-identified people, so everybody’s being super careful, and they want to be kind. But it’s a different situation. With LGB people, they’re saying, ‘Just let us be who we are.’ And there’s no medical consequences.

But with transgender-identified people or people who identify as the opposite sex, it’s very much a medical situation and it’s about the harm medicalization causes. Children are cutting off their healthy breasts and testicles and doing things to their bodies that they can’t undo. So that is completely different. Of course parents are concerned when their children identify this way because it carries a heavy medical burden which they will have for the rest of their life. They become sewn to the medical industrial complex. They will have to take drugs. They will probably have to have other surgeries. We don’t even know all the health consequences at this point. It’s an experiment happening right now on children.

In the past, most parents followed the watchful waiting approach. Children were not medically or socially transitioned, and the vast majority became comfortable with their sex when they went through puberty. Today, parents are being told that affirmation is the only acceptable response to a transgender declaration. Jennifer’s story is just one example of how there is another possible outcome if a child is not affirmed.

“They might desist,” she said. “Isn’t that preferable to a lifetime of harmful medical procedures?”

For more from IWF’s Identity Crisis series, click here.

Editor’s note: Last names have not been used to protect a minor’s privacy.

Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden To Direct HHS To Expand Access to Sex Change Treatments, Particularly for Children

ERPORTED BY DYLAN HOUSMAN, HEALTHCARE REPORTER | June 15, 2022

President Joe Biden will direct the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to expand access to “gender-affirming” care at a Pride month event Wednesday, the White House said. Biden will issue an executive order telling HHS to strengthen efforts to ban conversion therapy and increase access to sex change treatment for transgender Americans, including for children. The order will also target legislation passed in some Republican-led states to limit the promotion of LGBT material to children, such as Florida’s parental rights law.

Breaking: President Biden has signed an executive order blocking federal funding for conversion therapy. https://t.co/iXbzR6vhO0
— Mathew Shurka (@MathewShurka) June 15, 2022

The executive order explicitly endorses “gender-affirming” care, a euphemism for treatments, oftentimes irreversible, that facilitate a sex change, such as hormone therapy or sex-change surgeries. The Biden administration has staunchly supported providing those treatments to children.

“The President’s Order charges HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “The Department of Justice has intervened and filed statements of interest in lawsuits across the country challenging state laws that seek to ban transgender children from accessing gender-affirming health care and participating in school activities as unconstitutional.”

Biden will sign the order surrounded by LGBT children from Texas and Florida, two states which

have cracked down on the sexualization of kids this year, according to Politico. Florida’s parental rights law limits the promotion of sexualized content to children in schools, and Texas now has a policy that allows officials to investigate parents who aid their children in sexual transitions as minors for potential child abuse. (RELATED: How Influencers Lure Kids Into Transgender Lifestyle, Coach Them To Lie To Doctors)

Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the first openly-transgender American to serve in a Senate-confirmed position, reportedly endorsed the order in a statement: “Today’s executive order continues the Biden Administration’s work against prejudice and makes it easier for people living in this country to live their lives openly and freely without fear of harassment, scorn or attack.”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Democrats Think Teens Can Kill Babies And Sterilize Themselves But 18 Is Too Young For Self Defense

REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JUNE 09, 2022

Unlike committing an abortion or pumping your child full of hormones, the legal purchase or ownership of a gun does not cause anyone harm.

Author Elle Reynolds profile

ELLE REYNOLDS

VISIT ON TWITTER@_ETREYNOLDS

The same party that wants to raise the legal age for rifle purchases to 21 is also pushing to let minors kill preborn babies and mutilate their own genitals. American adults aged 18-20 already aren’t allowed to purchase handguns (and many states don’t allow them to obtain a concealed carry permit), more or less blocking them from practicing the basic self-defense precaution of stowing a defensive weapon to stop a bad guy with a gun. Now, Second Amendment deniers also want to bar these Americans from owning a rifle, a popular choice for home defense.

But while Democrats want to punish millions of law-abiding, prospective young gun owners for the evil, disturbed actions of a few of their peers, they’re also demanding that kids far younger be allowed to commit infanticide and mutilate their own bodies.

Letting Teens Commit Baby Murder

The radical abortion bill that Democrats renewed after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade sought to virtually eliminate any restrictions on abortion up to the point of birth. Minors are already allowed to obtain abortions, but the legislation would also nuke state laws mandating parental notification for such young girls. Lest you think this is an incidental inclusion, Democrats have specifically attacked state parental notification laws.

Planned Parenthood’s website doesn’t even try not to sound like a pervert offering kids candy: “If you’re under 18, you may or may not have to tell a parent in order to get an abortion,” it teases.

The ACLU estimates that 350,000 girls younger than 18 get pregnant in America every year, and that 31 percent (or roughly 108,500) of them choose to terminate their babies’ lives. There were 652,639 abortions reported to the Centers for Disease Control in 2014; in the same year, the Guttmacher Institute found that 0.2 percent of abortions — or roughly 1,300 — were executed on girls 14 years old or younger.

Fighting for these young, impressionable girls to get abortions doesn’t just push them into the commission of murder, with the likely accompaniment of lifelong guilt, it also subjects them to trauma themselves. Sarah Eubanks, a former abortion facility employee, described one 12-year-old girl whose grandmother brought her in for an abortion:

I remember that look on her face that she just didn’t understand what was going on. She didn’t want to be there. She started moving around and the doctor said, ‘You need to hold her down.’ I did put my hands on her and said ‘You have to settle down, you gotta be still, you’re gonna hurt yourself. You have to be still.’ And within an instant, she pushed her feet out of the stirrups and started running down the hall with the speculum in her vagina with blood running down her legs. The doctor said, ‘I’m not touching this.’ She was that upset. She just didn’t want to be there. She was screaming.

The hundreds of thousands of preborn babies’ lives lost to the abortionist’s scalpel every year haven’t dampened Democrats’ desires to let adolescent girls (or any women) make the decision to take a human life. But at the same time, the left will throw gun death numbers in your face to push their anti-gun agenda, even when firearm-related homicides are a fraction of abortion numbers, and are far outpaced by defensive gun use. Pew reported 19,384 murders involving a firearm in 2020, compared to up to 3 million “defensive gun uses by victims” per year, according to a CDC study.

Not only do Democrats want to let children kill their babies, they want to let children make damaging and irreversible changes to their own bodies.

Letting Children Sterilize Themselves

A report from Florida Medicaid found that “Available medical literature provides insufficient evidence that sex reassignment through medical intervention is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria,” and “the available evidence demonstrates that these treatments cause irreversible physical changes and side effects that can affect long-term health.” As a result, Florida Medicaid found that experimental procedures like cross-sex hormones or surgeries were insufficiently safe for coverage.

The report also listed the irreversible or potentially irreversible effects of cross-sex hormones, including facial and body hair growth, male pattern baldness, a deepening voice, and an enlarged clitoris for females taking male hormones, and breast growth, infertility, and sexual dysfunction for males taking female hormones. The irreversible effects of surgical interventions, such as elective mastectomies or genital amputations, are obviously far higher.

But those concerning effects didn’t stop the Biden administration’s Justice Department from sending an ominous memo to state attorneys general, threatening legal violations for states that don’t offer various damaging interventions to children.

“A ban on gender-affirming procedures, therapy, or medication may be a form of discrimination against transgender persons,” the memo stated. It also had the arrogance to claim that “it is well established within the medical community that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not only appropriate but often necessary for their physical and mental health.”

The Biden Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs further spelled out just what is meant by “gender-affirming care,” including social treatment of a child as the opposite sex, puberty blockers, artificial pumps of hormones like testosterone or estrogen, or surgeries like elective mastectomies and amputation of reproductive body parts. OPA recommends “social affirmation” for “any age,” puberty blockers at any time during puberty, hormones beginning in early adolescence, and surgeries for adults or “case-by-case in adolescence.” Some parents try to claim their children “came out as trans” as toddlers.

But No Guns for Law-Abiding Young Adults!

These procedures threaten lifelong damage to children who undergo them, yet the Biden administration and other Democrats want unfettered access to them and punishments for health professionals and parents who question them. They also celebrate the idea of teenage girls taking the lives of their preborn babies, with no parental consent and with no consideration of whether a child has the mental maturity to make such a decision — never mind the fact that it’s an act of murder.

But Democrats are all too happy to further erode Americans’ Second Amendment rights by arbitrarily raising the minimum purchase age for a rifle from one adult age to another. Unlike committing an abortion or pumping your child full of hormones, the legal purchase or ownership of a gun does not cause anyone harm. On the contrary, it often protects against it.

Yet Democrats support letting pubescent children abuse themselves and adolescents kill their children, while insisting that an 18-year-old who passes a federal background check can be denied the constitutional right to self-defense. Are 18-year-olds too immature for constitutional rights? Are children and teenagers old enough for a concocted right to harm themselves and others? I would argue it’s neither — but it can’t be both.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Lia Thomas Is ‘Happy’ To Force Everyone Else to Deal With Transgender Narcissism

POSTED BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JUNE 01, 2022

Lia Thomas and gender-bending allies say their delusional and norm-shattering behavior is fine because they’re happy, but that’s textbook narcissism, and we’ve enabled it far too long.

Author Kylee Zempel profile

KYLEE ZEMPEL

VISIT ON TWITTER@KYLEEZEMPEL

Transgender-identifying swimmer Lia Thomas — a man who claims to be a woman and recently dominated his NCAA female competitors — finally broke his silence with an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and here’s what he wants you to know: “I’m happy.”

Thomas was thrust into the limelight after the lackluster male swimmer took wrong-sex hormones for a year and subsequently the women’s Division I swimming title, causing quite a stir. When ABC interviewer Juju Chang asked about his competitive advantage — the question Thomas’s teammates, opponents, and critics can’t get past — Thomas shrugged it off.

“There’s a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do, and the biggest change for me is that I’m happy,” Thomas said in an undeniably male pitch. This “happy” theme permeated the whole interview, interspersed with an air of entitlement from the swimmer.
“I also don’t need anybody’s permission to be myself and to do the sport that I love,” Thomas declared, adding later, “Trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves.”

The kicker for Thomas, which is obvious to the watching world, is that actually, yes, you do need permission to be yourself and play the sport you love when that self defies the laws of biology and that sport is a collegiate program designed for the very real, immutable category of “women.” Any other student-athlete knows that if her “authentic self” is obese or jacked up on steroids, for instance, she will not get permission to play a collegiate sport, her sincere love for it notwithstanding. Where does the gender-bending left get the idea that they’re entitled to inclusion without permission?

The sorry state of the NCAA and the country’s cultural mores at large are actually in many ways a result of the “Lia Thomas mindset,” more commonly known as narcissism. When science and empirical data have said, like Chang, that males have a competitive advantage over females, the transgender-allied left, like Thomas, have dismissed it with a “They’re happy!” and a “Let them be their authentic selves!”

The rejoinder is obvious and unavoidable: What about the very real women whom Thomas dominated by virtue of him being a man? What about their happiness and their “authentic selves” as the best female swimmers? What about his troubled peers who have been flashed by Thomas’s penis in the women’s locker room and been forced to expose themselves in front of him? Although a happy Thomas insists, “Trans women are not a threat to women’s sports,” what are the runners-up supposed to do with the mountain of evidence to the contrary?

The rules of the game have been set not by logic nor reason nor basic and once-widely accepted facts, but by the narcissism of the minority. Perhaps — if their entitlement and lack of empathy rise to the level of diagnosable narcissism — the correlation of that narcissism with the trans-allied left should be no surprise. After all, research shows a leftist ideology, mental health issues, and LGBT identity go hand in hand in what’s known as the mental health-sexuality-liberalism nexus. If Thomas actually has gender dysphoria, perhaps that mental health issue corresponds with other mental health problems, narcissistic personality disorder being no exception.

The predictability of the narcissism, however, is no excuse for it. Nor is empathy for those with mental health problems a license to indulge them, especially when it comes at the expense of others. Thomas and the swimmer’s gender-bending allies have declared that their delusional and norm-shattering behavior is fine because they’re happy, but that’s textbook narcissism, and we’ve enabled it far too long.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

State Farm abandons support for LGBT book program targeting kids after whistleblower email release

Reported By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, May 26, 2022

An individual walks through the aisles of a library. | Unsplash/Banter Snaps

State Farm has withdrawn its support for a program that distributes LGBT-themed books to schools and libraries after a whistleblower leaked an email showing the company encouraged staff to donate books about gender identity to children as young as 5. The insurance company’s Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President of Public Affairs, Victor Terry, announced the end of the collaboration with the organization behind the program, GenderCool Project, in a Monday email to staff obtained by the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. The GenderCool Project describes itself as a “youth-led movement” designed to highlight “transgender and non-binary youth who are thriving.”

BREAKING: @StateFarm sent out a mass email to their staff today stating “we will no longer support that program” after they were exposed for supporting a project to push LGBTQ books into schools.
A source tells me “the agents were really upset when we found out.” W pic.twitter.com/55P1QJ0oLa
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 23, 2022

“State Farm’s support of a philanthropic program, GenderCool Project, has been the subject of news and customer inquiries. This program that included books about gender identity was intended to promote inclusivity,” the email reads. “We will no longer support that program.”

Terry also wrote that State Farm does not support mandating school curriculum on gender identity, stating that “[c]onversations about gender and identity should happen at home with parents.” The chief diversity officer said that the company supports organizations that provide “resources for parents to have these conversations.”

State Farm confirmed in a Wednesday statement to The Christian Post that it’s no longer affiliated with the organization, insisting again that the program was created to promote “inclusivity.”

“We will continue to explore how we can support our associates, as well as organizations that align with our commitment to diversity and inclusion, including the LGBTQ+ community,” the company told CP. “We recognize and value the diversity of all people and support a culture of respect and inclusion in the communities in which we live and work, as well as our workplace.”

State Farm’s announcement about the discontinuation of its partnership with The GenderCool Project followed the release of a Jan. 18 email leaked to the nonprofit organization Consumers’ Research by concerned employees at the insurance company. Consumers’ Research, an organization that educates people about policy issues and corporate activities, has launched the “Like a Creepy Neighbor” public awareness campaign in response to State Farm’s partnership with the GenderCool Project.

The title of the campaign is a play on the company’s catchphrase, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” The leaked email was sent by Jose Soto, a corporate responsibility analyst for State Farm in Florida. It reveals that State Farm was “partnering with The GenderCool Project to help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about being transgender, inclusive and non-binary.”

🚨 Emails leaked to @ConsumersFirst from concerned @StateFarm employees show the company engaged in the woke indoctrination of kids age 5+.

State Farm partnered with The GenderCool Project — which aims to have conversations with children about being Transgender and Non-Binary. pic.twitter.com/MYcZSW8Yp1
— Will Hild (@WillHild) May 23, 2022

The collection of books created by The GenderCool Project that State Farm sought to distribute includes works titled, A Kids Book About Being Transgender, A Kids Book About Being Inclusive and A Kids Book About Being Non-Binary. The books are designed to help children 5 years old and older have “challenging, important, and empowering conversations about the toughest and most pressing topics we face today.”

“The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children age 5+,” Soto’s email reads. “This is a fantastic way to give back and an easy project that will help support the LGBTQ+ community and to make the world around us better.”

The company reportedly intended to recruit six insurance agents to “[receive] these books in March, then [donate] them to their community by the end of April.” While the email only referenced recruiting agents in Florida, it indicated that the program is not just a regional initiative.

“Nationwide, approximately 550 State Farm agents and employees will have the opportunity to donate this three book bundle to their local teacher, community center, or library of their choice,” Soto wrote.

Hild told The Washington Examiner and other news organizations in a Zoom call that the program likely would not be allowed in Florida schools come July 1, when the Parental Rights in Education Bill takes effect.

Critics of the bill, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March, have derided it as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that could stigmatize LGBT students. The legislation prohibits public schools and third parties from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with students in kindergarten through third grade.

“We would hope State Farm would … cooperate with the governor’s office or law enforcement in [Florida] and retrieve any of these books that may have been donated to public schools that by law now do not belong there,” Hild said, adding that such discussions with children are inappropriate according to “any reasonable understanding.”

The issue of gender identity in schools has appeared in several learning institutions throughout the country in recent months. Earlier this month, Fairfax County Public School Board, which oversees the largest school district in Virginia, reviewed a student handbook that includes suspension as a potential punishment for students who “maliciously” misgender their trans-identifying peers.

The proposed revisions to the district’s Students’ Rights and Responsibilities (SR&R) handbook indicates that students can face a five-day suspension for “malicious deadnaming,” which is defined as “[w]hen someone, intentionally or not, refers to a person who is transgender or gender-expansive by a name other than their own chosen name.”

In April, two sets of parents of the Ludlow Public School District in Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against school officials at Baird Middle School in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts Springfield Division. The complaint maintains that the school officials reportedly encouraged their children to secretly adopt new gender identities without informing their parents. The lawsuit accused the school of having a “protocol and practice of concealing from parents information related to their children’s gender identity.”

Category:

Education, Family, Political

Tagged with:

Stop The Gaslighting. Conservatives Did Not Inflame the Culture War Over Trans Ideology

POSTED BY: CASEY CHALK | MAY 24, 2022

man in drag costume reads book to children at library

Leftists push their gender ideology on children, yet conservative parents complaining about Drag Queen Story Hour are blamed for starting a culture war.

Author Casey Chalk profile

CASEY CHALK

Can the gaslighting on gender and sexual identitarianism from the left get any more absurd? The Washington Post last month ran a story about how a decision by the community center in McLean, Virginia to co-sponsor a “Drag Story Book Hour” for children during Pride Month has, in their awkward wording, “set off culture wars.”

The May election for three open seats at the community center has attracted nine candidates, including Katharine Gorka, a former Trump administration official who has criticized the diversity, inclusion, and equity policies that resulted in the drag event. WaPo reporter Antonio Olivo observed, with editorial flourish, that this is “an example of how nothing is safe from the nation’s raging culture wars.”

A suburban community center hosts a drag queen story hour (DQSH) for elementary school students, yet it’s conservatives who are the ones stoking the culture war by complaining about it? A Florida school board member last year chaperoned a group of elementary school children on a field trip to a gay bar and the state’s community centers promote DQSH, but it’s conservatives who are the dangerous extremists for supporting a Florida parental rights in education bill?

Drag queens do bizarre, borderline pornographic acts in front of children, but it’s conservatives who are responsible for miseducating and damaging American youth? Come on.

Anything but Innocent

DQSH, as Gorka recently told me, “is not, as the American Library Association dishonestly describes it, an effort to combat ‘marginalization and underrepresentation.’” Rather, as the DQSH website itself declares, it is “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores” in order to “capture the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”

That word “play” is a bit concerning, especially given the sexually explicit nature of DQSH, and the many allegations that this pedagogy equates to grooming. A drag performer at one DQSH event in D.C. last year sang shirtless with duct tape on her breasts, sported a thong, and pretended to have fake sperm over her mouth.

Another DQSH event in Portland, Oregon in 2019 showed photos of children “lounging atop of the costumed queens on the floor, grabbing at false breasts, and burying their faces in their bodies.” This is not exactly light-hearted, appropriate public entertainment, notes Gorka.

A Concerning National Phenomenon

It would be more accurate to say that DQSH events bring the culture war directly to America’s children, with an ideological gameplan expressly dedicated to sexualizing our nation’s youth and urging children to consider themselves gender dysphoric. The first DQSH event in the United States was held in San Francisco in 2015. Since then, the events have spread across the country.

As of 2020, the official DQSH website boasted almost 50 independently operated chapters across the United States, including in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It is also supported by the American Library Association, whose extensive resource page includes information on how libraries can resist and censure people in local communities who object to these events.

Terrifyingly, the grooming charge is reality. In 2021, the former president of an organization that served as a sponsor for the Milwaukee Drag Queen Story Hour was charged with possessing child pornography depicting the sexual abuse of underage boys, including toddlers. In 2019, the Houston Public Library admitted a registered child sex offender to read to kids in a DQSH event. Allyn Walker, a transgender former assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, sought to defend people who are attracted to minors.

As I noted in a recent Federalist article, the media and schools aggressively promoting transgenderism have created a national crisis. There has been a dramatic, unprecedented surge in people identifying with sexual identities other than heterosexual.

As Abigail Shrier documents at length in her alarming book “Irreversible Damage,” the consequences for those who seek hormone treatment and/or sexual reassignment surgery are lifelong. DQSH marks an attempt to push the boundaries even further, not only for children entering puberty but to early elementary school and pre-K.

This truly is a national challenge. DQSH now reportedly has chapters in 29 different states, which means there is plenty of local political work to be done. As Gorka notes, “pornographic books such as ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue’ can be found in hundreds of school libraries across the country, thanks in part to the fact that The Young Adult Library Services Association (a division of the American Library Association) put the book at the top of its Teens’ Top 10 book list in 2021.”

Malevolent Gaslighting

This makes the left’s abusive and hyperbolic rhetoric on conservative resistance to DQSH and other grooming activities all the more insulting and infuriating. The Washington Post provocatively featured a political cartoon in April portraying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as responsible for the deaths of trans children. Liberal media outlets are claiming that conservatives should be held responsible for the suicides of children struggling with dysphoria.

Yet who encouraged prepubescent children to think about myopic topics like gender dysphoria in the first place? I certainly never heard of such things when I was in grade school in the 1990s. Who told children that their gender and sexual identity were the most important thing about them, and that misidentifying or misgendering amounted to the worst possible offense? Who is making millions of dollars off lying to and emotionally damaging impressionable, easily-manipulated children?

The answer is those advocating DQSH and the many other ubiquitous forms of sexual and gender propaganda influencing millions of American youth. It is they who are deceiving — and often permanently damaging — an entire generation of Americans for the sake of their own ideological agenda, the normalizing of bizarre, pornographic behavior.

No, conservatives did not inflame the culture war over trans ideology and drag queens. But we sure would like to stop it.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Planned Parenthood Profits Big from Getting Kids Hooked on Transgender Hormones Through The School-To-Clinic Pipeline

REPORTED BY: JARED ECKERT AND EMMA SOFIA MULL | MAY 10, 2022

Long the nation’s chief abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has branched out. Its latest endeavor? Sterilizing America’s youth. Planned Parenthood has quietly been in the gender transition business since at least 2017. Today, more than a third of its offices — 239 clinics in more than 40 states — provide transgender services. And it’s not stopping there.

While those seeking puberty blockers or surgical procedures are referred elsewhere, Planned Parenthood is offering access to cross-sex hormones, promoting gender ideology in sex ed programs, and establishing “well-being centers” in local high schools. The organization is looking to cash in on gender transition for years to come.

Easy Access

Just how readily does Planned Parenthood provide the gender-confused with cross-sex hormones? Consider the case of detransitioner Helena Kirschner. She received testosterone during her first visit — without blood work or a mental health referral.

Sadly, Kirschner is not the exception. Offices guarantee that patients can receive hormones without an evaluation of their mental health. They also promise that, in most cases, patients can expect same-day prescriptions.

Already thousands of kids are getting hormones like candy. Three California regional offices of Planned Parenthood recorded almost 4,000 gender-related visits from July 2019 to June 2021. In one California region, more than 750 cycles of hormones were prescribed in a year. These numbers are not representative for California; other Planned Parenthood offices in the state don’t even bother reporting these services.

Planned Parenthood offices state they only offer hormones to minors aged 16 or older with parental consent, but that is not the whole truth. In California, minors may receive “sensitive care,” like transition services, without parental permission. Given Planned Parenthood’s past deception, there’s no reason to think the organization won’t bend its own rules for profit.

And that’s just California. Thirty-three states plus D.C. have laws that, to some degree, allow minors to obtain routine health care without parental consent. In states where “gender affirming care” is deemed “medically necessary,” minors may be able to transition without parents knowing. And hormones may just be one Planned Parenthood appointment away.

All of this is deeply troubling. Despite Planned Parenthood’s deceptive marketing, transition is not proven to be the best medical practice. We know that 88 to 98 percent of gender dysphoric kids will reconcile with their biological sex if allowed to go through puberty “untreated.” Moreover, those who do transition are estimated to be 19 times more likely to commit suicide than their peers.

Comprehensive Sex-Ed

Even before Planned Parenthood helps minors transition, it teaches them to desire it. Across the country, schools hire Planned Parenthood or its affiliates to lead sex ed. And its reach is not insignificant. Nationally, 1.2 million students receive Planned Parenthood’s affiliate sex ed programming each year, according to the organization’s last annual report.

While curriculum requirements vary by state, these programs promote everything from abortion and the morning-after pill to gender fluidity and transition. By indoctrinating youth, the abortion giant creates the demand it needs to profit from gender services.

Well-Being Centers

But creating demand does not stop with sex ed. Planned Parenthood wants to cement a permanent school-to-clinic pipeline. In 2019, the abortion giant announced it would open 50 “wellbeing centers” in Los Angeles high schools. These centers will offer “health and wellness education services, sexual health services,” and more. Innocuous as these services appear, they exist to market Planned Parenthood’s services. Handpicked staff will provide transition support and chemical abortion.

Ultimately, Planned Parenthood’s rapid expansion of services should raise alarm. Planned Parenthood is no longer a danger just to the pregnant and the unborn, but to every teen as well.

Legislation Needed

Thankfully, state and federal policymakers can help protect minors from falling prey to these “services.” By enacting bills like Arkansas’ SAFE Act, states could stop Planned Parenthood and others’ efforts to mislead minors. Instead of passing bills that undermine parental rights (as California has done), states should work to ensure parental rights are upheld and respected.

In Congress, members must remain vigilant against the Equality Act, which would make the school-to-surgery pipeline a permanent fixture of American society. Lawmakers should also consider Hyde-like riders to ensure the Biden administration can’t redirect federal dollars to help Planned Parenthood sterilize our kids.

Elected officials who haven’t been bought out by woke corporations can learn from the far-left’s tone deafness. Policies that protect kids and empower parents are popular with voters, especially parents. By championing parents and children, legislators can stop bad actors like Planned Parenthood from preying on the vulnerable.

Jared Eckert is a research assistant in The Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family. Emma Sofia Mull is a graduate of the think tank’s Young Leaders Program.

JARED ECKERT AND EMMA SOFIA MULL

Category:

Education, Health, Law, Political

Tagged with:

Today’s FOUR Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Sex, Lies, and Censorship

A.F. BRANCO | on April 22, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-sex-lies-and-censorship/

The Mainstream media continue trying to ignore the Hunter Biden laptop Joe Biden Corruption connection.

Hunter laptop Scandal — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Common Sense Not Included

A.F. BRANCO | on April 23, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-common-sense-not-included/

Democrats are talking about ankle bracelets and phones for illegal immigrants as opposed to turning them away at the border.

Illegal Immigrant Phones — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Critical Race Tyranny

A.F. BRANCO | on April 24, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-critical-race-tyranny/

Gov. Walz, Democrats, and the teacher’s union are pushing Critical Race Theory against the will of parents.

Critical Race Theory Minnesota — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Tragic Kingdom

A.F. BRANCO | on April 25, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-tragic-kingdom/

Disney Corp is against the Desantis bill that protects parents’ rights from radical leftist teachers.

Disney Gone Woke — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Disney to air ad accusing Americans who oppose genital mutilation of kids of wanting to ‘tear families apart’

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Tuesday, April 12, 2022

The Walt Disney Company will soon be airing an ad on all of its channels featuring the mother of a trans-identified child lambasting supporters of bills banning genital mutilation surgeries for children and the teaching of LGBT ideology in schools. The mother accuses these Americans of trying to “tear our families apart.”

The LGBT advocacy organization GLAAD released the public service announcement called “Protect Our Families” last week. The 60-second ad profiles the Briggle family, which includes Amber Briggle along with her husband and her two children. The ad focuses on her trans-identified daughter, who now identifies as a boy and goes by the name Max.

The LGBT advocacy group says the video shows that “families with transgender kids are just like any other family: they love their kids unconditionally and simply want the best for them.”

In the video, Briggle discusses Max’s interests as she narrates a background video of her daughter in an effort to persuade those watching the ad that society should support parents who want their children to be given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, saying a transgender child “is no different than yours.”

“There are some politicians who are trying to tear my family apart, simply because my [daughter] is transgender,” she asserts. “Trans kids don’t have a political agenda. They are just kids. They just want to be left alone.”

CNBC reports that the ad, which does not explicitly mention any legislation, in particular, will air on channels owned by The Walt Disney Company as well as channels owned by Comcast, WarnerMedia and Paramount. The Walt Disney Company has received intense criticism over its outspoken opposition to a Florida parental rights bill recently signed into law by the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The legislation states that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation and gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” While states including Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas have passed laws banning the prescription of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to minors, the Florida law does not include such a provision.

After initially declining to take a position on the Florida bill, Disney, which operates the popular theme park Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, came out hard against the bill after critics derided it as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Disney’s opposition to the law that prevents teachers from exposing young children to LGBT ideology, motivated worship artist Sean Feucht to hold a protest in front of Disney’s headquarters in Burbank, California.

Last month, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute and City Journal released video footage of Disney officials discussing their efforts to incorporate “queerness” and other LGBT ideology into programming directed at children as part of what he described as “Disney’s all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill.”

Briggle, a progressive activist who is running for city council in Denton, Texas, operates a blog titled “Love to the Max.” In an August 2019 blog post, Briggle listed “3 things your child can do to help make middle school better for my trans son.” Accompanying the blog post is a photograph of Max, which identifies the child as a member of the fifth grade graduating class of 2019. This seems to indicate that Briggle’s child is now in eighth grade and is either 13 or 14 years old.

In the blog, she noted that “my sweet [daughter], Max, socially transitioned in 1st grade — changing [her] name and pronouns, but otherwise living life exactly the same (only much, much happier).” In a speech at this year’s GLAAD Media Awards, Briggle said, “We live in Texas, where Gov. [Greg] Abbott issued a directive to investigate parents like my husband, Adam and I for child abuse because we provide Max with the gender-affirming care he needs.”

'I am angry every single day because of the way the world treats my son' — Mom Amber Briggle delivered a tearful speech at the GLAAD Media Awards after being investigated for providing gender-affirming care for her trans son in Texas pic.twitter.com/q4nc6kiP68
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 5, 2022

Briggle added that Child Protective Services recently visited their home and questioned them. She expressed relief that “a court has barred Texas from investigating parents of trans kids.”

Supporters of legislation banning what LGBT advocates refer to as “gender-affirming care,” including the American College of Pediatricians, warn that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones can have negative side effects. Side effects of puberty blockers identified by the American College of Pediatricians include “emotional instability” as well as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility.”

The medical organization lists “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan” as possible complications of cross-sex hormones.

While supporters of providing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to youth with gender dysphoria maintain that such procedures help improve the children’s mental health, children who underwent some form of gender transition only to regret doing so later insisted that such procedures worsened their mental health.

The newsmagazine program “60 Minutes” profiled a group of “detransitioners” last year, including a male who once identified as female explaining to CBS’ Lesley Stahl that he “had never really been suicidal before until I had my breast augmentation.” He told Stahl that “about a week afterward, I wanted to actually kill myself,” adding: “I had a plan, and I was going to do it but I just kept thinking about my family to stop myself.”

Another detransitioner, who once sought to transition from female to male, developed a “really disturbing sense that, like, a part of my body was missing, almost a ghost limb feeling about being like, there’s something that should be there.”

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

Category:

Education, Family, Political

Tagged with:

Utah, Indiana Republican Governors Allow Men to Dominate Women’s Sports

REPORTED BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | MARCH 23, 2022

Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox became the latest GOP governor to veto legislation Tuesday aimed at protecting women’s sports with a prohibition on male participation.

“I am not an expert in transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting,” Cox wrote to explain the veto. “When in doubt, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion.”

The female swimmers who lost in a competition dominated by Lia Thomas last weekend, a transgender athlete who competed in the men’s league for years under the University of Pennsylvania, may take a different view of what constitutes “kindness, mercy and compassion.” The 22-year-old fifth-year senior took home the NCAA Women’s Swimming Championship in the 500-yard freestyle Thursday over a slate of female competitors.

Reka Gyorgy, a swimmer at Virginia Tech who came up short in the qualifier for the event, criticized the NCAA’s policy allowing biological males with years of testosterone-enhanced capability to compete in women’s leagues if they merely identify as women.

“It doesn’t promote our sport in a good way, and I think it is disrespectful against the biologically female swimmers who are competing in the NCAA,” Gyorgy wrote in an open letter to the collegiate athletic association post on Instagram. “It feels like the final spot was taken from me.”

Cox’s decision to allow men to compete in women’s sports came a day after Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb vetoed similar legislation. In his veto letter to lawmakers, Holcomb explained the bill left “too many unanswered questions,” a justification similar to one South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem gave last year when she refused to sign a bill protecting women’s sports.

Noem eventually capitulated on the issue nearly a year later, signing a bill to bar male athletes in women’s competition without a mea culpa for her intervening crusade against right-leaning outlets that exposed her dubious reasons for the initial veto. Holcomb is known for favoring big business interests over the interests of Indiana’s majority-Republican voters.

Hours before Cox vetoed the proposal to bar male competition in female leagues, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis officially recognized Thomas’ runner-up in the 500-yard freestyle race, Emma Weyant, as the true champion.

By allowing men to compete in women's sports, the NCAA is destroying opportunities for women, making a mockery of its championships, and perpetuating a fraud.

In Florida, we reject these lies and recognize Sarasota's Emma Weyant as the best women's swimmer in the 500y freestyle. pic.twitter.com/tBmFxFE3q6
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 22, 2022

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

The Studies Cited To Support Gender-Bending Kids Are Largely Junk Science

REPORTED BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | MARCH 10, 2022

The transgender misinformation machine is at it again. The New York Times recently published an extensive essay arguing against screening before medical transition — if someone says she wants hormones or surgery, doctors should immediately break out the syringes and prep the operating room.

The article, by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich of Bowdoin College, exemplifies how the transgender movement uses misinformation to advance its agenda. Marzano-Lesnevich asserts, “That gender-affirming health care saves lives is clear: A 2018 literature review by Cornell University concluded that 93 percent of studies found that transition improved transgender people’s heath [sic] outcomes, while the remaining 7 percent found mixed or null results. Not a single study in the review concluded negative impact.”

That seems dispositive — unless you look at the studies. The cited literature review was titled the “What We Know Project” and was directed by the LGBT scholar and activist Nathaniel Frank, who cited it in his own New York Times piece on transgenderism a few years ago, writing that “Our findings make it indisputable that gender transition has a positive effect on transgender well-being.”

Poorly Conducted Studies

These proclamations that the science is settled are a bold facade on rickety scaffolding. When this New York Times article invokes the authority of science, it seeks to evoke the image of careful statisticians sifting through data collected by diligent doctors.

But it is actually appealing to self-selected online surveys with cash prizes, studies with tiny samples, and studies that are missing more than half of their subjects. Stacking a bunch of weak studies on top of each other doesn’t provide a strong result, but The New York Times presumes readers won’t bother to check the details — the editors certainly didn’t.

Back in 2019, I took a closer look at the studies the What We Know Project cites, and found a methodological mess. Many of the studies had serious flaws, beginning with small sample sizes. As I noted, “Of the fifty relevant papers identified by the project, only five studies (10 percent) had more than 300 subjects, while twenty-six studies (52 percent) had fewer than 100. Seventeen studies (34 percent) had fifty or fewer subjects, and five of those had a sample size of twenty-five or less.”

The flaws extended far beyond small sample size, and the largest studies tended to be the weakest, often consisting of little more than online surveys with a self-selecting sample. Nor should we put much faith in a study that recruited subjects for an online survey by advertising “on online groups and discussion forums that were dedicated to FTM [female-to-male] members. . . . Upon survey completion, participants were entered into a lottery drawing for cash prizes.”

Even the better-designed long-term studies were often plagued by poor response rates. A European study had 201 out of 546 respond — just 37 percent. And though missing data is, by definition, missing, it is reasonable to suspect that those with poor outcomes are overrepresented among those who could not or would not respond.

Regret Rates

Nor did The New York Times check Marzano-Lesnevich’s claim that “gender-affirming health care has some of the lowest rates of regret in medicine. A 2021 systemic review of the medical literature, covering 27 studies and 7,928 transgender patients, found a regret rate of 1 percent or less.” But read the paper and it is quickly apparent both that the review has significant weaknesses and that The New York Times allowed its conclusions to be misrepresented.

Of the 27 studies used in their analysis, the review authors ranked only five as “good” and only four as having a low risk of bias. Many of the studies had the same flaws as those examined in the What We Know Project (indeed, some studies were used in both).

Another problem is that the majority of the data in the 2021 review came from a single study conducted by a Dutch group retrospectively examining the records of their own gender clinic. But a retrospective review of medical files will only identify regrets from patients who shared them with the gender clinic that performed their surgeries. Furthermore, the study only identified regrets following gonadectomy, and not those who regretted other surgeries, or who never had surgery but did regret taking cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers.

In addition to the problem of allowing a flawed data set to dominate the 2021 review, this illustrates another persistent difficulty with studies of transgender regret, which is that they are often conducted by those who provide medical transition, rather than independent researchers. People whose livelihoods and reputations depend on facilitating medical transition might be less than diligent and rigorous in looking for regret.

To their credit, the authors of the 2021 review do discuss some of the limits and difficulties of their work, writing that various problems:

represent a big barrier for generalization of the results of this study. The lack of validated questionnaires to evaluate regret in this population is a significant limiting factor. In addition, bias can occur because patients might restrain from expressing regrets due to fear of being judged by the interviewer. Moreover, the temporarity of the feeling of regret in some patients and the variable definition of regret may underestimate the real prevalence of ‘true’ regret.

None of these qualifications regarding regret were even hinted at in the published column. Despite The New York Times’ citing it, the 2021 review does not prove that “gender-affirming health care has some of the lowest rates of regret in medicine.”

As the authors note, regret is not only an imperfect measure, but it is often difficult to measure, with no set criteria defining it. In one Swedish review cited by the What We Know Project, it was defined “as application for reversal of the legal gender status among those who were sex reassigned,” which excludes those who succumbed to depression or addiction, or who lived unhappily after transition without seeking to legally detransition.

Gatekeeping before Transition

Furthermore, even if we uncritically accept the results of the 2021 review, it does not support the argument that gatekeeping before medical transition is unnecessary and harmful. Rather, the authors claim that the low regret rate they found “reflects and corroborates the increased [sic] in accuracy of patient selection criteria for GAS [gender affirmation surgery].”

In short, the review argues that medical gatekeeping keeps regret rates low. That The New York Times allowed this review to be used as evidence against medical screening, and in favor of self-ID for medical transition, exemplifies the persistent practice of American transgender activists using studies of (mostly) carefully screened European adults to argue against screening before medical transition, even for children.

Unfortunately, the aggregation of (often questionable) studies, and the exaggeration of their conclusions by activists, is only part of the problem. These efforts to spread misinformation are augmented by the intimidation of dissenting scientists and the suppression of results that trans activists dislike.

Suppressing Dissent

Researchers have learned to fear the wrath of LGBT activists, and take pains to avoid it. Results that undermine the narrative have to be carefully presented lest the public draw the wrong conclusions. Thus, when scientists concluded that there is no “gay gene” they “worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups and science-communication specialists on the best way to convey their findings in the research paper and to the public.”

With regard to transgender ideology, the intimidation is even more overt. For example, Lisa Littman’s qualitative study describing the phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria met a ferocious response from transgender activists. Similarly, activists smeared Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker and forced him out of his position as the leader of a gender identity clinic, even though he sometimes supported transitioning children. He was just more cautious about it than activists wanted. He was eventually vindicated, but targeting him still sent a warning to any researchers who are seen as insufficiently pro-trans.

As these cases demonstrate, the science is being manipulated to fit transgender ideology. Shoddy studies — often conducted by activists and doctors with a stake in medical transition — are boosted if they support the trans narrative, while results and researchers who challenge it are suppressed. This skewed data is then used by trans activists and their allies to shape the discourse.

Uncomfortable facts and stories are kept out of the official narrative. Insightful and moving first-person accounts of transition and detransition are confined to non-traditional outlets such as Substack, as are the warnings of leading trans doctors about the reckless rushing of children into transition. The information bubble is the point.

Going forward, disagreement will be labeled “misinformation” and banned from social media, and dissidents will be labeled as bigots who should be fired from their jobs. Doctors will be required to practice only according to the approved narrative, and educators will encourage children to transition without parental knowledge and consent. Worse still, the government will take children from parents who do not support transition.

The purpose of the transgender misinformation machine is not so much to persuade, but to provide justification for coercion. The point of the lies and distortions is to impose transgender ideology on all of us, especially children.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Wisconsin School District: Parents Are Not ‘Entitled to Know’ If Their Kids Are Trans

REPORTED BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 08, 2022

Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.

Empower Wisconsin obtained a copy of a training slide from a late February staff development session. The 2021-22 Equity session on Safe Spaces reminds teachers that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.”

“Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student,” the professional development facilitator guide states. Teachers were encouraged to “Talk amongst yourselves!”

The lesson — that teachers know better than parents about what is best for their kids — is not sitting well with some community members.

“We are appalled that ECASD would display such blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children. We are equally dismayed that current school district leadership would pressure teachers into breaking a social contract that we all know and understand—that parents and guardians hold primary responsibility and decision making for the welfare and care of their children,” said parents and school board candidates Nicole Everson, Corey Cronrath, and Melissa Winter in a joint statement.

The district’s training session is also legally suspect. A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent. The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of parents challenging the gender identity policy “that violates the rights of parents to make important healthcare decisions on their children’s behalf.” The policy includes the following provisions:

Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.
District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.

It’s not clear whether the Eau Claire Area School District has a similar policy.

The school board candidates are demanding district administrators issue an apology to teachers for “placing them at odds with families and also to parents and guardians for breaking the trust and partnership that is critical for thriving students and a stellar school district.”

An apology doesn’t appear to be forthcoming. ECASD Superintendent Michael Johnson issued a statement to Empower Wisconsin asserting the district is upholding its responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is “equitable, safe and inclusive for all students.”

“Our staff often find themselves in positions of trust with our students. The staff development presentation shared extensive data and information to assist our staff members in our ongoing efforts to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students,” Johnson said in the statement. “The ECASD prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.”

The superintendent said the staff training focused on data showing students who identify as non-heterosexual have a higher incidence rate of mental health issues than heterosexual students. But critics say a school’s commitment to “equity and inclusiveness” does not give license to educators to hide important information from parents and guardians.

Cronrath, Everson, and Winter are among seven candidates, including two incumbents, running for three open seats on the school board next month. The three jumped into the race because they were concerned about the eroding of parental rights in the district. They say Eau Claire schools’ “blatant disregard for parental rights and responsibilities” has been creeping into the district’s classrooms. The latest training session sends three very dangerous messages to parents and the wider community, the candidates assert.

1. Schools are in control of children, not parents and families—When you entrust your child into the walls of ECASD, you no longer have the right as a parent to be informed of major developments in your child’s school life. In fact, you must ‘earn it.’
2. Current Leadership is willing to pit teachers against parents—Open communication between the classroom and home has always been critical to healthy school communities and student development. ECASD is putting teachers in a difficult and dishonest position by instructing them to actively withhold information from parents.
3. What goes on in the walls of ECASD is privileged information—By indicating that information about your child is ‘knowledge that must be earned,’ ECASD is setting a dangerous precedent. If identity questions for your child can be hidden from you, is diet, curriculum, healthcare, inappropriate relationships, mental health concerns, etc. also no longer the business of parents? Just what are parents and guardians allowed to know and when?

The Republican-led state legislature passed a Parental Bill of Rights that would prohibit school policies that infringe on a parent’s or guardian’s role as the primary caregiver of their child. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat and the former state superintendent, is likely to veto the bill.

Eau Claire Area School District has a history of overreach. Last fall, school officials worked with the local health czar in removing a 14-year-old girl from school after someone in her class tested positive for Covid-19. The girl and her mom resisted, accusing authorities of abusing their powers. The county health director then sought a court order to have the girl forcibly removed from school.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Biden threatens to take action after Texas designates puberty blockers, castration ‘child abuse’

Reported By Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post Contributor | Monday, March 07, 2022

The Biden administration has threatened to take “immediate action” against Texas after the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton designated puberty blockers and the castration of children child abuse under state law and Gov. Greg Abbott decided to investigate parents who allow their gender-confused children to undergo such procedures.

“This is government overreach at its worst,” President Biden said in a statement last week. “Like so many anti-transgender attacks proliferating in states across the country, the Governor’s actions callously threaten to harm children and their families just to score political points. These actions are terrifying many families in Texas and beyond. And they must stop.”
Biden said the Department of Health and Human Services has put the state of Texas “on notice that their discriminatory actions put children’s lives at risk.”

The same day, the HHS issued new guidance saying such restrictions likely violate federal civil rights laws. HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra released a statement, announcing he has directed his team “to evaluate the tools at our disposal to protect trans and gender diverse youth in Texas, and today I am announcing several steps we can take to protect them.”
“HHS will take immediate action if needed,” Becerra continued. “Any individual or family in Texas who is being targeted by a child welfare investigation because of this discriminatory gubernatorial order is encouraged to contact our Office for Civil Rights to report their experience.”

In a formal opinion last month, Paxton said that certain sex-change procedures and treatments “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions of chapter 261 of the Texas Family Code.” Such procedures include castration, the removal of healthy body parts, as well as the prescription of experimental puberty-blocking drugs, among others.

“Beyond the obvious harm of permanently sterilizing a child, these procedures and treatments can cause side effects and harms beyond permanent infertility,” he stated.
“The medical evidence does not demonstrate that children and adolescents benefit from engaging in these irreversible sterilization procedures.”

Paxton added that allowing such invasive procedures in an attempt to make a child appear more like the opposite sex, like removing private parts, “would deprive the child of the fundamental right to procreate, which supports a finding of child abuse under the Family Code.”
“Because children are legally incompetent to consent to sterilization, procedures and treatments that result in a child’s sterilization are unauthorized and infringe on the child’s fundamental right to procreate,” Paxton continued.
“The lack of authority of a minor to consent to an irreversible sterilization procedure is consistent with other law. The federal Medicaid program does not allow for parental consent, has established a minimum age of 21 for consent to sterilization procedures, and imposes detailed requirements for obtaining that consent.”

Last August, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jamie Masters published a letter asserting that “genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse, subject to all rules and procedures pertaining to child abuse.”

Masters’ letter came after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott requested that the agency “issue a determination of whether genital mutilation of a child for purposes of gender transitioning through reassignment surgery constitutes child abuse.”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Why Parents Should Assume Government Schools Will Sexually Abuse Their Children Until Proven Otherwise

REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | FEBRUARY 22, 2022

This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.

Coaxing 10-year-old girls away from their parents, promising a fun and safe environment, and then forcing them to sleep in the same room as grown men is the kind of behavior you’d expect from a sexual predator. It’s child endangerment at best and traumatizing abuse at worst. Yet that’s exactly what California’s Los Alamitos Unified School District forced little girls at a school-organized science camp to do for three nights in San Bernardino, according to outraged parents.

“No parent should feel the way I feel after knowing what could have happened to my daughter,” parent Suzy Johnson told local news. “If I was aware of it and I had initialed something saying this was going to be done at this outdoor science camp, I would have kept my children home.”

When confronted about the sleeping arrangements, the camp’s defense was, “Per California law, we place staff in cabins they identify with,” and the two men refer to themselves as “they/them.”

While the science camp incident is enraging, it’s far from the first or only indication that government schools likely harm children more than they benefit them. Before entrusting their kids to a behemoth that has repeatedly subjected children to abuse, parents should demand proof that schools are trustworthy — and assume they aren’t until proven otherwise.

Public schools’ insane obsession with the transgender agenda has physically endangered young girls before. Just look to Loudoun County, where a boy in a skirt raped a young lady in the women’s bathroom and the school board covered it up to keep the incident from sinking their transgender bathroom policy. What else don’t parents know about?

When these far-left pipe dreams about erasing sex don’t subject kids to physical abuse, they often inflict mental abuse. Even in a red state like Idaho, a report earlier this month found that “School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery” behind her parents’ backs. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation reported.

In Virginia, a public school made kindergarteners sit and listen to a “transgender rights advocate” — a man dressed as a woman who goes by “Sarah” — read them a book about a transgender teen.

In Iowa, a school district used the “Black Lives Matter at School Guiding Principles” to teach kids as young as four years old to “free[] ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle cis-gender privilege,” and “disrupt[] the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

A school in a small Colorado town outside of Boulder showed elementary students a play about a transgender raven, accompanied by videos like “He, She, and They – What is Gender” and “No More Gender Roles.” The videos include conversations with a gender-confused teddy bear that conclude gender roles are “mean, they are not fun and they are big problems.” One parent of a first-grader reported that, after showing one of the videos, his daughter’s teacher paired kids up to talk about their preferred pronouns.

Leaked audio from a conference of California’s largest teachers union revealed teachers being instructed on how to stalk middle schoolers and coax them into LGBT groups behind their parents’ backs. “Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,” Abigail Shrier reported.

School libraries like the one at Baird Middle School in Massachusetts feature sexually explicit books like “Sex Is A Funny Word” by Cory Silverberg. Not only does the book cover “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation,” its author is a sex shop owner who specifically targets kids.

A Rhode Island mom filed a police report over a local high school’s promotion of a gay porn book to minors in its library. The book “features discussion of gay sexual fantasies and is incredibly graphic, including scenes of gay men having sex and a scene of one man performing oral sex on another.”

These examples are only some of the incidents that have been brought to light — and they merely scratch the surface. Exposing vulnerable children to sexually explicit material and indoctrinating them to question their own identities, often against their parents’ wishes, is nothing less than mental abuse and exploitation.

A Harvard study in 2015 found youth who identified as transgender were at more than double risk for depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and self-harm. Last year, Forbes reported that more than half — 52 percent — “of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020.” Even aside from students’ exposure to the trans agenda, the toxic environment of public schools has tragically been linked to child suicides, which have escalated in recent years.

This isn’t to say every student in the public school system will be tempted to suicide, subject to pornography, placed in danger of sexual assault, or mentally abused. There are wonderful, truth-loving teachers out there who remain in the system to do as much good as they can for children they care deeply about. I know several. But the examples from all across the country, from known crazies in California to small-town red state school districts, should be enough to convince parents to be wary. Especially of what schools don’t tell them.

Nothing should be more paramount for parents than protecting their children. If a stranger offers to babysit your child, you don’t accept the offer with the rationale that your child might be fine. You expect anyone to whom you entrust your child to first prove he is worthy of stewarding your most sacred possession. Public schools are no different, and the repeated instances proving their abuses should drive your trust even further away. Maybe, like many Americans, you don’t feel you have what you think are feasible alternatives. Or maybe your local school district is sheltered from some of the most radical exploitation. But it behooves you to verify that first before betting your child on it.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Samantha Chang Op-ed: Biden Nuclear Hire Is Drag Queen Who Talks About ‘Sex with Animals’ and Has Called NIH Chief ‘Daddy Fauci’

Commentary By Samantha Chang | February 11, 2022

The Biden administration continues to make bizarre recruiting decisions for top government jobs on the basis of toxic identity politics. A recent addition to President Joe Biden’s motley crew of dubious hires is drag queen Sam Brinton, who was tapped last month as the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy.”

Rather than touting his qualifications for the job, Brinton — who lists his pronouns as “they”/”them” — bragged on Twitter about his unique status as the “first gender fluid person in federal government leadership.”

In a biographical statement on an LGBT website provided by Brinton, he boasted about having “worn his stilettos to Congress to advise legislators about nuclear policy and to the White House, where he advised President Obama and Michelle Obama on LGBT issues.”

The bio continued: “He shows young men and women everywhere he goes that they can be who they are and gives them courage. Once, while he was walking around Disney World in 6 inch stilettos with his boyfriend, a young gay boy saw Sam with his boyfriend and started crying. He told his mother, ‘It’s true, Mom. WE can be our own princess here.’”

Brinton is an active member of the Washington, D.C., chapter of a drag queen society known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” the National Pulse reported Thursday.

The drag queen has referred to White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci as “Daddy Fauci” and even called him a “saint.”

There are also photos on social media where he displays his fondness for “pup play,” a sexual role-playing game.

In a 2016 interview with the LGBT-focused Metro Weekly magazine, Brinton discussed his fetish in detail.

“Pup and I have what I feel is one of the most ideally perfect connections between our personal and kink life,” he said. “Both of us have other partners, so we come into this space, and then we come out of it, knowing the boundaries of where your kink and non-kink relationships begin and end.”

Brinton acknowledged that others didn’t understand his activities.

“One of the hardest things about being a handler is that I’ve honestly had people ask, ‘Wait, you have sex with animals?’” he told Metro Weekly. “They believe it’s abusive, that it’s taking advantage of someone who may not be acting up to a level of human responsibility. …
“The other misperception is that I have some really messed up background, like, did I have some horrible childhood trauma that made me like to have sex with animals.”

This is who’s helping Biden run the country right now, which is in shambles amid record inflation, soaring crime, race wars and ongoing border invasions.

People can do whatever they want in the privacy of their homes (provided it’s not illegal or hurting anyone), but the fact that the kinky sex life of a high-level Department of Energy executive overshadows his qualifications is truly alarming. This is how empires crash and burn.

Under Biden, we are witnessing the real-time destruction of America — economically, culturally and socially. And we’re only in Year 2 of his reign.

Truth and Accuracy

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Samantha Chang, Contributor,

Samantha Chang is a politics writer, lawyer and financial editor based in New York City.

@Samantha_Chang

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

ESPN Fans Turn Against Network After It Promotes Transgender Swimmer

Reported By Abby Liebing | January 25, 2022

Sports network ESPN has finally run coverage of Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. But both ESPN’s coverage and the general issue of having a transgender swimmer competing against women have sparked controversy and backlash from viewers. At first, ESPN was confronted for not covering Thomas enough and was called “cowardly” by Jason Whitlock at Blaze Media.

In mid-January Op-Ed titled, “ESPN isn’t man enough to even discuss transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas,” Whitlock called out the sports coverage leader for ignoring Thomas.

Comparing Thomas to “Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Colin Kaepernick rolled into one gender transition,” Whitlock noted that while the Ivy League and other universities had made announcements about Thomas competing in women’s swimming events, ESPN remained silent. Then ESPN finally ran an article about Thomas.

Written by reporter Katie Barnes, who is known for covering LGBT issues and women’s sports, the article highlighted how Thomas has been winning, even in the midst of protests against the fact that he was allowed to compete in races against women. Barnes looked at the policies and discussions taking place over the principles of transgender athletes in various sports and how the NCAA and other organizations are changing policies.

The NCAA revised its policy about the eligibility of transgender athletes. Instead of a blanket policy for all schools and sports, the NCAA decided to use the policies of each individual governing body, meaning that requirements will vary for different sports. The NCAA’s new policy also will require testosterone testing in the championship windows, beginning in 2022-23.

Barnes’ article also explained that, though Thomas has won individual events, he didn’t set any records.

“At Blodgett Pool, Thomas finished first in both of her individual events. But she didn’t set any records in either the 100 or 200 freestyle. She high-fived teammates and laughed with them between races. Despite the controversy continuing to swirl around her, Thomas turned in what is becoming a typical performance,” Barnes wrote.

But after ESPN ran the article, there was significant outcry on social media, as readers spoke up and many disagreed with the idea of a transgender athlete competing in women’s sports.

“Sidelining women in womens sports. Hope everyone is proud of themselves,” one Facebook commenter posted.
“In this case we have a male body racing female bodies. While I do not believe Lia Thomas switched to being a woman to dominate swimming, she has the same advantage over her competitors as a drug cheat would,” another user commented.
“ESPN cheers on the death of female sports. Shameful,” another posted.
“1st and foremost EVERYONE has the right do whatever makes them happy in regards to physical appearance and Identity. With that being said this is obviously unfair to natural born female athletes,” another Facebook user wrote. “It’s my understanding that fairness and equality for all are major pillars of the LGBTQ community. I don’t see either of these under the current format. There needs to be a 3rd division added or compete in the men’s division until we know more…”

Teammates of Thomas have also commented on the situation, though. Not all of them are comfortable with the fact that Thomas is competing against women. Speaking anonymously to the Washington Examiner, one teammate explained how the female swim team members were overlooked in this process.

Apparently, Thomas’ move from male to female swimming was in the works for quite some time and the university knew that the change was coming. But as this one Penn swimmer described, the university’s athletic department never asked those already on the team about adding Thomas.

“Lia swimming was a non-negotiable,” the swimmer said. “The school made it seem like they were trying to say, ‘Don’t even bother to come to us with your concerns or anything like that because we’re not going to help you.’ Or they don’t really care because ‘this is going to happen one way or the other.’”

The swimmer added how stressful it was to be put in this position, because if team members did have concerns, they felt like they couldn’t speak up.

“It just seems like if you say anything, everyone is just going to attack you and call you transphobic, and it’s not even true. We just want to have what we were promised by joining the swim team, which is fair competition and equal opportunities,” she said.
“It’s been really frustrating because we all agree, and I have yet to meet anyone or talk to anyone who thinks what is going on is OK. But yet somehow, these are the rules and allowed,” she added.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that though the whole team had been strongly advised not to talk to media about the issue, another teammate also came forward to complain.

As Thomas continues to compete and beat competitors by large margins (in one 1,650-yard freestyle event, Thomas beat his teammate by 38 seconds, the Mail reported), the controversy continues. From teammates to ESPN readers, there are a lot of people questioning the situation.

Abby Liebing, Associate Reporter

Abby Liebing is a Hillsdale College graduate with a degree in history. She has written for various outlets and enjoys covering foreign policy issues and culture.

Category:

Political, Sports

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Pain In The…

A.F. BRANCO on January 12, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-pain-in-the/

Liberal women have endorsed the very transgender rights that are now biting them in the rear via Trans-athletics.

Women’s Rights vs Trans Rights — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

VIDEO: Mom eviscerates 2 California teachers accused of coaching her 12-year-old to change genders behind her back

Reported by PHIL SHIVER | December 17, 2021

The family of a 12-year-old middle school student in Salinas, California, recently accused two teachers of secretly coaching the young girl’s gender transition behind their backs, according to videos posted online this week. During a Spreckels Union School District board meeting on Wednesday, the girl’s mother and grandfather sounded off on the district, alleging that school staff altered her name and pronouns without their consent and called Child Protective Services when they objected to her social transition. The family said that teachers didn’t even notify them after finding out their daughter was suicidal.

The girl’s mother, identified as Jessica Konen by the Epoch Times, alleged in her speech that her daughter’s clandestine transition occurred within an LGBTQ+ club at Buena Vista Middle School.

“I am outraged,” the mother said, asking, “Is this really barely coming to light?”
“How could you even allow this?” she continued. “You allowed these teachers to open their classrooms teaching predatorial information to a young child … that doesn’t even know how to comprehend it all.”

The speeches were also documented in a Twitter thread posted by the profile “Libs of TikTok.”

The school reportedly called the parents in for a meeting where they informed them that their daughter is trans. The teacher then proceeded to call CPS on them when they didn’t use the “correct” name and pronouns.

This is the dad’s speech tonight: pic.twitter.com/17gl3QBRrQ
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 16, 2021

“How do you not know what is going on at your campuses?” the enraged mother went on to say, declaring, “You took away my ability to parent my child.”

The grandfather, identified as Gunter Konen, claimed during his speech that his granddaughter is “confused because she was coached” by the teachers.

“CPS was called on my daughter because she went into school to have a discussion with a teacher for hiding the fact that she was given a new name, a boy’s name,” he added, noting that to refer to a child as a boy simply because the child claims to be a boy is “vile nonsense.”

CPS later dropped the case, the Epoch Times reported.

“Kids are impressionable at that age,” the grandfather said, also suggesting that “we need God back in America. We need God back in schools.”

The teachers in question appear to have been the subject of an exposé article published last month by Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.”

In the article, Shrier claimed that leaked audio from an October California Teachers Association conference showed Buena Vista Middle School teacher and LGBTQ club leader Lori Caldeira and fellow middle school teacher Kelly Baraki describing how they recruited students into the club and concealed the students’ activities from parents. The teachers reportedly admitted that they recruited kids into the club, in part, by stalking their Google searches and monitoring their conversations.

Outrage over the teachers’ behavior reportedly prompted the district to announce significant changes in November. In a letter to parents, the district announced that the school club, called UBU (“You Be You”), had been suspended and that teachers were no longer permitted to monitor students’ online activity, among other changes, according to KSBW-TV. Though it was not clear what action was taken against Caldeira and Baraki.

The letter only said: “Regarding the teachers involved, appropriate personnel steps are being taken to make sure such activities and comments will not be repeated.”

In an interview with Epoch Times prior to the school board meeting, Jessica Konen said her daughter was coaxed into joining the club when she was in sixth grade, where teachers began affirming bisexuality. By seventh grade, she was called into the school for a meeting with her daughter, a teacher, and the school principal. There, the teacher informed her that her daughter was “trans fluid.”

“They kept looking at me angrily because I kept saying ‘she,’ and that it was going to take me time to time to process everything,” Jessica Konen said. “I was very confused. … I was very upset. I was blindsided — completely blindsided.”

Within a few days of the meeting, the King City Police Department reportedly showed up at the family’s residence, saying a complaint had been made to CPS.

Konen said that her daughter is now attending a different school.

Category:

Education

Tagged with:

Video: UPenn trans swimmer demolishes female competition by almost 40 seconds: ’Just to show you how absurd this is’

Reported by PHIL SHIVER | December 15, 2021

University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas — formerly known as Will Thomas — has garnered national media attention in recent weeks for shattering collegiate swim records that were previously held by biological women, sparking fresh accusations of unfair competition.

Thomas, who competed as a male at the school during her freshman, sophomore, and junior years, decided to undergo a year of testosterone suppression treatment ahead of her senior year in order to compete as a female. To no one’s surprise, the biological male is dominating the competition.

But it’s one thing to hear about Thomas’ newfound domination, and another thing entirely to see it. A new video that surfaced online shows just how wide the gap is between Thomas and the women competing against her.

“Just to show you how absurd this is. Here’s the trans swimmer ‘Lia’ Thomas crushing all of the female competitors by 40 seconds,” Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh tweeted in a caption to the video. “This is what that looks like in real time. A total farce.”

Just to show you how absurd this is. Here’s the trans swimmer “Lia” Thomas crushing all of the female competitors by 40 seconds. This is what that looks like in real time. A total farce.

pic.twitter.com/kAi9GgF5sj
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 15, 2021

The video showcases the tail end of Thomas’s incredible performance during the 1,650-yard freestyle race at the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio, during which Thomas bested the second-place finisher by an eye-popping 38 seconds.

During the video, the narrator quips that “the lefties have just gone a little too far with this one” while pointing out how fast Thomas swam in relation to the competition. He then painstakingly points out the numerous times that female swimmers make their turns and continue racing while Thomas rests having finished well ahead of them.

“Thomas is a 6-foot 3-inch strapping young man coursing with testosterone and here he is in a girls swimsuit competing with the girls,” the narrator says.

Since the story started receiving national attention, at least two teammates of Thomas’s have spoken out about the unfair situation. One anonymous teammate said last week that having Thomas on the team is something that “secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do.”

“When the whole team is together, we have to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.’ It’s very fake,” the team member told Outkick.

Another teammate expressed that the entire team is “angry” over the situation.

“They feel so discouraged because no matter how much work they put in it, they’re going to lose,” she explained. “Usually, they can get behind the blocks and know they out-trained all their competitors and they’re going to win and give it all they’ve got.”
“Now they’re having to go behind the blocks knowing no matter what, they do not have the chance to win. I think that it’s really getting to everyone,” the female swimmer continued.

The team member added that amazingly Thomas, unfazed by the criticism, has been bragging about being No. 1 in the country amongst female swimmers.

“Well, obviously she’s No. 1 in the country because she’s at a clear physical advantage after having gone through male puberty and getting to train with testosterone for years,” the swimmer said. “Of course you’re No. 1 in the country when you’re beating a bunch of females. That’s not something to brag about.”

Thomas responded to some of the criticism recently in a podcast interview with SwimSwam.

Penn’s Lia Thomas Opens Up On Journey, Transition To Women’s Swimmingyoutu.be

Category:

Education, Health, Political

Tagged with:

Democrats Like Me Are Furious With Our Party For Pushing Gender Insanity

Reported By Kara Dansky | NOVEMBER 16, 2021

It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is in crisis about the meanings of the words sex and gender. We are all victims of this crisis, but the primary victims are women and girls. Throughout U.S. law, the word sex is being completely redefined to mean “gender identity” or “transgender.” Congress is doing it. The Biden administration is doing it. The federal courts are doing it.

Most Americans have no comprehension of the implications of this, due to no fault of their own. Very few media outlets will permit us to talk about it. Yet feminists have been talking about it for a long time. The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) has been talking about it since its founding in 2013 (I served on the board of WoLF from 2016-2020).

Jennifer Bilek talked about it in this publication in her 2018 essay, “Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?” She continues to talk about it in her outstanding 11th Hour Blog. The Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) has been talking about it globally since 2019 and in the United States since 2020 by advancing the aims of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, which has been signed by more than 20,000 people and hundreds of organizations (I currently serve as the president of the U.S. chapter).

The mainstream media steadfastly ignores all of this and is engaged in a concerted effort to hide it from Americans. But Americans are waking up, due in large part to the steadfast work of radical feminists or, as some people might say, “TERFs.” The acronym “TERF,” said to mean “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” was created by misogynists to demean those of us who fight for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. Many feminists have chosen to reclaim the acronym, arguing that it stands for “Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools” or “Totally Excellent Radical Feminist.”

In October of this year, comedian Dave Chappelle made headlines when he proclaimed that he is “Team TERF” during his Netflix show “The Closer.” The hashtag #TeamTERF immediately started trending on Twitter. Chappelle did this in the context of defending British author J.K. Rowling, who has faced relentless abuse for her defense of women and girls and abuse survivors. If fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls makes me a TERF, then so be it.

Many people will be angry with me for publishing in The Federalist because The Federalist is a conservative-leaning publication. I am not a conservative and never have been. I registered to vote as a Democrat in 1990. Since then, the only time I was not a registered Democrat was during a brief period in 2007 when I was registered Green (I re-registered as a Democrat so I could vote in the 2008 Democratic primary and have remained so ever since).

Still, I am grateful to The Federalist for publishing this because no one else will. That’s because U.S. media has been completely corrupted by an industry that is hell-bent on persuading ordinary Americans that there is such a thing as “gender identity” and that some people “are transgender.”

The truth is that “gender identity” does not exist in any real, material sense, and “transgender” is simply a made-up concept that is used to justify all kinds of atrocities, such as convicted male rapists and murderers being housed in women’s prisons with vulnerable women, men being permitted to parade around with erect penises in women’s sections of spas, and men participating in women’s sports. They are being permitted to do all of this on the basis that they have a so-called “female gender identity.”

All of “gender identity” and “transgender” politics is a men’s rights movement intended to objectify women’s bodies and erase us as a class. The entire edifice is a lie. It is left-wing misogyny on steroids.

Democratic Party leadership will not permit discussion about this, anywhere. But I assure readers that there are countless rank and file Democrats who are furious about it. I hear from them every day. Democrats are disgusted that party leadership is promoting the teaching of “gender identity” in schools down to the kindergarten level, celebrating the mutilation of healthy children’s bodies, and cheering on performances of “drag queen story hour” in public libraries.

The Democratic Party of today looks nothing like the Democratic Party that I was proud to be a part of just about all my life. Many Democrats share my despair. If the Republican Party manages to nominate just about anyone who is a decent human being for the presidency in 2024 (hint: “Grab ‘em by the p-ssy” guy is not included in this category), many Democrats will vote Republican.

Gender ideology is one of the reasons Democrats lost House seats in 2020 and one of the reasons Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in Virginia this month. I was proud to stand with parents in Loudoun County, and grateful to The Federalist for covering it (that coverage eventually got picked up in the U.K. via The Daily Mail). Gender will be one of the reasons that Democrats will lose more congressional seats in 2022 as well as the presidency in 2024.

I know people who have left the Democratic Party because of gender and become Independents. I know one woman who left the Democratic Party because of gender and registered Republican. I choose to remain a Democrat because I continue to hope the party will reverse course, as unlikely as that appears to be at this time, and have done my best to warn party leadership about what is coming here and here and here.

I am a second-wave feminist and a Democrat. I stand for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. These cannot be protected if sex is redefined incomprehensibly to include so-called “gender identity.”

Feminists have a saying: we cannot protect women and girls on the basis of sex if we cannot say what sex is. My hope is that lawmakers across the political aisle will get a grip and right the wrongs that have been perpetrated in the name of “gender identity.”

Every single human being is either female or male. No one “is transgender.” It’s long past time that lawmakers across the political aisle and members of corporate media said so.

Kara Dansky is a feminist, lawyer, and advocate, and the author of the new book, “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” She currently serves as the president of the U.S. Chapter of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign. You can find her at www.karadansky.com and @kdansky on Twitter and Facebook.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Parents sue Florida school district over colluding with daughter to change her gender identity

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter| Thursday, November 11, 2021

Parents in Leon County, Florida, are suing the school district for holding a meeting with their teenage daughter about her chosen gender identity without their knowledge or consent. The parents have warned that the district’s LGBT policies create a “wedge” between students and their parents.

January and Jeffrey Littlejohn filed a lawsuit against the school board, Superintendent of Schools Rocky Hanna and Assistant Superintendent, Equity Officer and Title IX Compliance Coordinator Kathleen Rodgers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida on Oct. 18.

In the lawsuit, the Littlejohns accuse the defendants of violating their substantive due process right to direct the education and upbringing of their children under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and other rights guaranteed to them by state and federal law by excluding them from a meeting with school officials discussing their 13-year-old daughter’s gender identity.

Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, a legal organization created two-and-a-half years ago “specifically to stand with and help parents who are in some way or the other … seeking to protect the well-being … of their child from gender identity ideology,” is one of the attorneys representing the Littlejohns in the litigation.

In an interview with The Christian Post, January Littlejohn and Broyles elaborated on the lawsuit and the events that led up to it.

Littlejohn explained that her daughter, who is now a high school student, began undergoing treatment for gender confusion in the summer before the start of the 2020-’21 school year. She attributed her daughter’s gender confusion to peer pressure from her “friend group because three other children in that same friend group had come out as nonbinary or transgender within the previous six months.”
While Littlejohn told one of her daughter’s teachers at Deer Lake Middle School that she was “seeking mental health counseling and she was experiencing distress that we weren’t affirming her at home because we didn’t feel like it was in her best interest,” she did not expect the school to begin referring to her daughter using they/them pronouns and give her the option to sleep in the same quarters as her male classmates on an overnight school field trip.

Littlejohn only found out that the school had taken such action because her daughter revealed to her that she’d had a meeting about her “nickname,” with the concerned parent telling CP that “that’s kind of what we refer to it as.”

She said her daughter then asked, ‘“isn’t it funny that they asked me what restroom I wanted to use?”’
“My daughter has ADHD … and so to her, this seemed like the silliest thing in the world that they asked her which restroom she preferred to use. That was my first indication that the school had met with her without … notifying my husband or myself,” she said.
“I immediately called her guidance counselor. The guidance counselor said she needed to call me back. She called me back with the assistant principal on the line. So right then and there, I knew something … felt different about the situation because I had spoken to the guidance counselor multiple times in the past because of my daughter’s 504 plan … for her ADHD.”
Littlejohn accused the school of “colluding with my daughter to deceive us so that we would never have known she was going by an alternate name.”
The concerned mother also insisted that she “absolutely should have been at that meeting” and expressed disbelief that the school that she volunteered at did not partner with them. “I was volunteer of the year at that school. It wasn’t like I was an unknown parent.”
Littlejohn recalled the detrimental impact of the school’s decision to hold meetings with her daughter about her gender identity confusion without her knowledge or consent, saying: “It created a huge wedge between our daughter and us, as her parents. We have worked very hard over the past year-and-a-half to stabilize the situation through counseling, and I do feel like she’s on a better path at this time.”

Broyles told CP that the purpose of the lawsuit was to get the school district to “rescind the guidance … that was in place that … basically instructed school officials not to inform parents when a child begins to indicate a transgender or LGBTQ+ identity.” The attorney expressed particular concern that the guidance implied that “outing a student to their parents could be dangerous to a student’s well-being.”

“Every time I think about this lawsuit, it really hits me: The district guidance had the message to parents that you don’t have the best interests of your child in mind. It sends the message that children need to … be protected from parents rather than by parents, and that is an earth-shattering message that cannot stand,” Broyles asserted.

Specifically, the guidance, part of the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide,” warned that “Outing a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the [student’s] health and well-being” because “some students are not able to be out at home because their parents are unaccepting of LGBTQ+ people out.”
The guidance maintains that “as many as 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+, many of whom have been rejected by their families for being LGBTQ+,” suggesting that “outing students to their parents can literally make them homeless.”

“We are seeking that guidance to be permanently removed and replaced with new guidance that complies with the Parents’ Bill of Rights there in Florida as well as the Florida and United States Constitution that honors the parents’ right to make decisions for their children,” Broyles added. “It’s really important to recognize that affirming a child’s discordant gender identity … involves a significant mental health decision that affects the well-being of children … and with potentially lifelong consequences.”

The lawsuit, as summarized by Broyles, is asking the school district to implement new guidance requiring school officials to notify parents whenever their child “expresses gender discordance, gender confusion, a different identity other than their physical, biological sex” and “new policies that provide public notice and a public hearing regarding the new guidance through the school board.” Additionally, the Littlejohns are seeking “some sort of monetary damages for the … pain and suffering and … the impacts this has had on their family.”

Broyles stressed that the situation facing the Littlejohns is not unique: “This violation of parental rights is driving a wedge between parents and their children by school officials. … It affects parents … all throughout the political spectrum on both political parties or independents, whether it’s Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics. … We’ve spoken to almost virtually every stripe of parent.”

The attorney maintained that the Child and Parental Rights Campaign is working on several similar cases: “We hear almost weekly from parents who have … something similar happening to them and their children.”
“This same guidance I described to you is present on the websites of at least 11 other school districts throughout Florida,” Broyles said. She further noted that the “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Student Support Plan” included in the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide” is also on the ACLU’s website.
“A lot of these documents are already out there and school boards, based on what I’ve been told, simply adopt those and put their name on them,” Broyles added.
“That’s why there seems to be the exact same guidance in multiple counties in the state of Florida and all over the country in all 50 states.”

Littlejohn told CP that she’s aware of other parents in Leon County that have found themselves in the same situation as herself.

“A lot of the parents are really scared to speak out or they don’t feel like they can speak out because it would jeopardize the very fragile relationship they have with their child who’s experiencing distress related to their gender.” She added that she speaks to other families “almost weekly to try to help them understand the situation at hand and help them get resources.”
She also pushed back on the claim that the school was conducting a “benign intervention”: “It’s the first step toward medical transitioning, which is why it is so imperative that parents be included [in] any discussion with their child that could impact the short-term and long-term mental and physical well-being of their child, whether it’s this issue or any issue. So fundamentally, this is about parental rights and what the schools can and cannot do … without their permission.”
Littlejohn emphasized that despite the harm this experience has caused to her and her family, “it’s made our faith grow” as Christians. She seconded Broyles’ assertion that “this issue affects all kinds of families” and “people of all faiths including atheists.”

In the time since officials at Deer Lake Middle School first met with Littlejohn’s daughter to discuss her gender identity, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the Parents’ Bill of Rights into law. The measure mandates that “important information relating to a child should not be withheld, either inadvertently or purposely, from his or her parent, including information relating to the minor child’s health, well-being, and education, while the minor child is in the custody of the school district.”

Additionally, the law directs school districts to work with parents, teachers and administrators to “develop and adopt a policy to promote parental involvement in the public school system.”

Superintendent Hanna reacted to the Littlejohns’ lawsuit in a statement to news outlet WCTV: “We certainly want to include parents, and with the Parental Bill of Rights, I understand and respect that, but we also have to respect the rights of the individuals, safety of the children we care for each and every day” because “while the children are under our care we act in loco parentis, on behalf of a parent while they’re under our care.”

The lawsuit follows a year of unsuccessful efforts to convince the school district to change its policy. Littlejohn insisted that “We tried to do this without filing a lawsuit, which was never our intention.”

While the complaint mentions that the district removed the guide from the publicly accessible portion of its website, it alleges that the district did not comply with the Littlejohns’ request to “publish on the Website a written statement that parents would be notified when their child/children express a discordant gender identity and included in meetings or discussions with their child/children regarding their gender identity.”

The complaint contends that “there is no indication on the website or otherwise that the Guide has been rescinded, only a notation that it is being revised.” Additionally, it states that “no revised guidance regarding parental notification has been published or provided to Plaintiffs.” The website of the Leon County Schools’ Equity and Diversity Department has a section devoted to the LCS LGBTQ+ Support Guide, which informs visitors that “[the] Guide is currently being reviewed and is under revision.”

The lawsuit against Leon County Schools comes at a time when parents have expressed an increasing amount of unease with some of the material their children are exposed to in school. In recent weeks, outraged parents and community members in several states have descended on school board meetings to condemn the inclusion of sexually explicit material in books available to students in school libraries and writing prompts in a textbook used in a college-level English class.

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

Category:

Education, Spiritual

Tagged with:

Twitter suspends Republican congressman’s account for calling Rachel Levine a man

Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, October 25, 2021

Twitter has suspended the account of a Republican congressman who posted a tweet noting that President Joe Biden’s U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, who identifies as transgender, is a man. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., was suspended Saturday after posting a tweet in response to Levine — who went by the name Richard before he began identifying as female — becoming the first trans-identified four-star officer in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

Banks has been temporarily blocked from using his Twitter account until he agrees to delete the tweet calling Levine a man, according to NBC News. In the now-deleted tweet posted Tuesday, Banks lamented that “the title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man.” Twitter claimed that the tweet violated its hateful conduct policy, which prohibits tweets that engage in “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

For his part, Banks took to his Instagram account to post a statement denouncing the actions of Twitter, saying that the social media site was censoring “a basic truth.”

“My tweet was a statement of fact. Big Tech doesn’t have to agree with me, but they shouldn’t be able to cancel me. If they silence me, they will silence you,” he warned.
“We can’t allow Big Tech to prevent us from telling the truth. When Republicans take back the House next year, we must restore honesty to our public forums and hold Big Tech accountable.” View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jim Banks (@repjimbanks)

Levine was the previous secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in March to be assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services in a 52-48 vote.

In a tweet still visible as of Monday morning, Banks criticized the hailing of Levine as the first “female” four-star officer at the corps, arguing that it disrespected biological females.

“Calling someone that was born and lived as a man for 54 years the first ‘female’ four-star officer is an insult to every little girl who dreams of breaking glass ceilings one day,” tweeted Banks on Oct. 19.

HHS deputy secretary Andrea Palm swears in Levine, with @Surgeon_General Vivek Murthy (a vice admiral himself) as witness.

Levine now the first openly transgender four-star officer across any of the eight uniformed services, which include Army, Navy and Air Force. pic.twitter.com/ne2xBdsFk9
— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) October 19, 2021

While speaking during the swearing-in ceremony, Levine expressed optimism that there would be more efforts at diversifying the ranks of the corps.

Levine — who plans to regularly wear the blue uniform of the corps — delivered remarks after being sworn in.

“May this appointment today be the first of many more to come,” the new admiral said. “Diversity makes us stronger.” pic.twitter.com/JepXrOcFZH
— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) October 19, 2021

“May this appointment today be the first of many more to come,” stated Levine. “Diversity makes us stronger.”

Banks is not the first person to face repercussions from Twitter for asserting that Levine is a biological male. On Jan. 20, the day of Biden’s inauguration, radio host Michael Brown sent out a tweet asking, “Will I get punished by Twitter for saying that, in God’s sight, ‘Rachel’ Levine (nominated by Biden to be his assistant secretary for HHS) is a man?” Shortly after that, Brown was locked out of his account for 12 hours.

A recent report from a media watchdog reveals that censorship of conservative politicians is not an uncommon phenomenon. The Media Research Center found that censorship of Republican members of Congress outnumbers censorship of Democrats in Congress by a ratio of 54 to 1. Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

When Did Sexual Assault In Schools Become A Partisan Issue?

Reported By Elle Reynolds | OCTOBER 21, 2021

In 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about a female student named “Jackie” who claimed she was raped at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia.

“The 9,000-word story prompted a wave of outrage and revulsion,” said the Washington Post. The fraternity in question was graffitied within hours, protesters descended upon the campus in Charlottesville, Va., the university president suspended Greek life until the following year, and elected officials condemned the incident.

“University of Virginia Contends With Outrage Over Horrific Rape Reports,” Time Magazine headlined. CNN reported on the story and the university’s swift reaction to it, as did ABC News. The Huffington Post also picked up the story.

The story, we now know, later unraveled, leading to a retraction from Rolling Stone and massive defamation lawsuits. But not before the appalling tale of a helpless young woman being brutally assaulted on an educational campus shook Americans’ sensibilities. No one was disagreeing that, if true, the incident deserved horror, outrage, and efforts to try and keep such abuses from happening again.

The Story We Should All Be Up In Arms About

Just seven years later, a similarly harrowing tale has emerged just 100 or so miles away from U-Va., in Loudoun County, Va. An investigation from The Daily Wire earlier this month reported allegations from Loudoun County father Scott Smith that in May, “a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.”

“A boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school,” according to Smith’s attorney.

But instead of receiving national outrage across the political and media landscape, the alleged incident was reportedly covered up by the Loudoun County School Board for months. In a June meeting, board members insisted they didn’t know of any such assaults. After showing up to a school board meeting in protest, Smith was arrested and smeared as a “domestic terrorist.”

Days after the Daily Wire investigation broke, another report alleged the school district had been failing to report sexual assault claims for years. Meanwhile, LCPS appears to have quietly transferred the alleged rapist to another school, where he has since been accused of another sexual assault of a female student.

Where Is The Outrage?

Where is the outrage? A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” returns zero results on the Washington Post’s website, despite Loudoun County’s close proximity to the Post’s home city. On Tuesday, the Post finally published something on the story, but failed to mention Smith by name and initially failed to admit that the alleged attacker identified as “gender fluid.”

A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” or “Loudoun sexual assault” returned no results from The New York Times on Wednesday. The extent to which CNN covered the story was to say “[Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn] Youngkin on Tuesday promised action following parental outrage over two recent alleged assaults in public schools in the state’s Loudoun County,” immediately after a paragraph of damage control for Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe’s statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Can you imagine if, instead of discovering holes in the U-Va. story, additional coverage had revealed that the school had been covering up other sexual assault allegations for years? Or, if the allegations in the Rolling Stone story had been true, can you imagine if U-Va. had quietly moved the rapists to another fraternity and tried to cover the whole thing up? Or tried to smear Jackie and her family as “domestic terrorists”?

The Loudoun County incident has all the ingredients of a horrifying scandal worthy of the front pages of every newspaper in the country. It should provoke our outrage, not as conservatives, but as caring and compassionate human souls whose sympathies are pricked by the horrors allegedly endured by an innocent 15-year-old girl.

If We Can’t Agree Rape Is Bad, What Can We Agree On?

Ensuring the safety of young girls — in their places of learning and elsewhere — should not be controversial. But the loudest voices on the left, the same ones who screamed “Me Too” from the rooftops of their Hollywood mansions, are too allegiant to the fringe demands of transgenderism to speak up. Many voices in the middle, even, seem too cowardly to come to the defense of young women like Smith’s daughter.

In a widening partisan divide, if we can’t agree that young girls being raped at school is an outrage, what can we agree on? Does the left hate conservatives with such vitriol that, once voices on the right speak up for a young girl’s right to bodily safety, that issue is suddenly anathema, tainted by the fingerprints of concerned parents slandered as domestic terrorists?

Plenty of other common-sense perspectives that any Democrat nominee would have supported up to a couple of years ago have suddenly become “radical” conservative positions too: funding police departments, not segregating kids in school based on race, having international borders, or allowing people to make their own medical decisions without government coercion. Any of these should have been enough to make Americans stop and wonder why the rules of the game are changing so drastically — and who is changing them.

But even for those who had yet to notice, the harrowing tale from Loudoun County Public Schools — and the subsequent shrug that legacy media, Democrats, and the Me Too crowd gave it — should settle that the biggest war in America right now isn’t between Republicans and Democrats, nor between blustering, blundering congressmen battling over whether to sell your children’s future for $3.5 trillion or $1 trillion.

The biggest war in America is between the allegiances we’ve always taken for granted — those of the family, church, and local community — and a conglomerate of forces that will stop at nothing to break them down. Sacrificing a 15-year-old girl’s right to basic safety at her school on the altar of fringe identity politics is just part of that fight.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Democrats Pushing Transgenderism In Schools Are Fully Responsible For Bathroom Sexual Assaults

Reported By Terry Schilling | OCTOBER 19, 2021

It’s a phone call every parent dreads receiving. Earlier this year, Virginia father Scott Smith was notified his 15-year-old daughter had been sexually assaulted. While that news was horrific, little did Smith know this would just be the start of a nightmarish series of events in which he would end up being cast as the villain. He can thank Democrats for enabling the whole outrageous affair.

The saga began back on May 28 at Loudoun County’s Stone Bridge High School, the sheriff’s office confirmed, where Smith was summoned by school officials. Smith told The Daily Wire he learned his daughter had allegedly been assaulted in a girls’ restroom by a boy wearing a skirt. (According to some reports, the boy identifies as “gender-fluid.”) Smith said school officials told him they intended to handle the incident in-house, instead of through the police and courts. After Smith became understandably upset at this callous and wholly improper decision not to involve law enforcement, he says school officials calls the police on him.

Fortunately, Smith was not arrested that day, but the story did not end there. A month later, he attended a Loudoun County School Board meeting to protest a proposed policy that would, among other things, allow students to access whatever restroom or locker room corresponds with their self-identified sex.

Concerned parents argued the policy would take privacy and safety from girls. LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler responded, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” Smith couldn’t believe his ears. Later, a conversation between a left-leaning parent and Smith grew heated when the other parent implied Smith was lying about his daughter. This time, police did arrest him and video of the incident went viral. Overnight, Smith became the poster boy of supposedly dangerous parents. The National School Boards Association even specifically pointed to him in the now-infamous letter to the Biden administration, arguing that distraught parents ought to be seen as “domestic terrorists.”

The full truth about what had happened to Smith’s daughter did not become public until this past week: The sexual assault committed against her was no anomaly. Not only that, it was the direct result of policies promoted and advanced by Democrats who are willing to sacrifice the bodies, minds, and souls of innocent children to protect leftist gender ideology from criticism.

The prime culprits of the Smith family’s tragedy are dictates like Virginia’s “Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools.” Such dictates — disarmingly labeled “policies” — elevate subjective “gender identity” over sex, allowing male students to participate in girls’ sports, lodge with girls on overnight school trips, and, yes, access girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

This is far from a new project. Democrats have been attempting to impose their gender insanity on the rest of the country since at least the Obama administration, when the U.S. Department of Education threatened schools with a loss of federal funding if they did not implement such policies. Unfortunately, weak Republican governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem have also been complicit through their refusal to meaningfully resist this agenda.

Concerned parents and others have fought this effort, arguing these changes would put girls in particular at risk to potential predators. Sespite Democrats’ best attempts at gaslighting, this is exactly what’s happened, and not just in Virginia. In November 2017, a five-year-old girl in Georgia was allegedly sexually assaulted in her school bathroom after the school introduced a new transgender policy. Her case, Thomas v. City Schools of Decatur et al, is still making its way through the state’s courts.

Still, Democrats and their left-wing allies refuse to even acknowledge this outcome of their transgender policies. After claiming there had been no assault in a school restroom, the Loudoun County School Board passed its new transgender policy in August. The alleged perpetrator was reportedly transferred to a different high school where, earlier this month, he was reportedly charged with sexually assaulting yet another girl. Still, the corporate media blackout of the story persists, while the Biden administration and Democrat politicians — and their henchmen in Big Tech and the press — continue to vilify ordinary parents like Smith.

Democrats’ true priorities are clear. Despite past “believe all women” rhetoric, their party’s ideology about sex has driven them to summarily toss aside the safety of girls in their campaign to normalize crazed gender ideology. As for the fundamental right of parents to choose how their children are raised, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe last month spelled out where he and his Democrat comrades stand: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

To stop the left’s nefarious agenda, parents and pro-family Americans must become politically engaged and toss out bad elected officials. If this doesn’t happen soon, Scott Smith’s nightmare could be endured by many others around the country.

Terry Schilling is the executive director at American Principles Project.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – New Teacher

A.F. BRANCO on October 17, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-new-teacher/

The Left wants to indoctrinate our kids with radical Ideas about sex and pornography.

03 Sex Ed Teach AN 1080 — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Stupid Policy Tricks

A.F. BRANCO on October 18, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-stupid-policy-tricks/

Biden and his administration’s policies are turning America into one big Dumpster fire.

03 Dumb ster LI 1080 — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Three Follow-up Articles About Skirt-Wearing Male Student’s Sexual Assaults at Loudoun County Public Schools

Skirt-wearing male student accused of brutal bathroom sex assault was previously placed under electronic surveillance for similar attack: Report

By SARAH TAYLOR | October 14, 2021

The skirt-wearing male student at the center of a purported sexual assault that recently took place in a vacant school classroom was previously placed under electronic surveillance for another sexual assault, according to reports.

Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj on Wednesday announced that the same 15-year-old has been charged in both crimes.

According to a Wednesday report from Newsweek, the male Loudoun County, Virginia, high school student accused of assaulting a female student in a school classroom was reportedly under court-ordered electronic surveillance for a previous sexual assault charge when the assault incident took place.

The outlet noted that it is unclear at the time of this reporting as to why the 15-year-old male student was permitted on school property after having been charged with sexually assaulting a fellow student in a bathroom just five months prior to the new incident.

The unnamed teen was accused last week of sexual assault after he reportedly forced a female victim into an empty classroom at Broad Run High School in Ashburn, Virginia, where he reportedly “held her against her will and inappropriately touched her.”

The student, just five months earlier, was arrested for reportedly sexually assaulting a female student while wearing a skirt in another Ashburn-area school bathroom in May.

Authorities in May charged the teen with two counts of forcible sodomy for the purported bathroom assault.

He is currently being held in the Loudoun County Juvenile Detention Center, according to a report from WTOP-TV.about:blank

WTOP reported that the teen was due to appear in court this week regarding the May incident, but the date has been rescheduled due to the filing of the second charge.

In a Wednesday statement, the Loudoun County School Board said that police are investigating the incident.

“Loudoun County Public Schools is aware of the media and social media reports concerning alleged sexual assaults at two of our high school campuses,” a portion of the statement said. “Principals are legally required to report to the local law enforcement agency any act, including sexual assault, that may constitute a felony offense. That process was followed with respect to these allegations.”

The statement added, “Furthermore, LCPS is prohibited from disciplining any student without following the Title IX grievance process, which includes investigating complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault. LCPS does impose interim measures to protect the safety of students involved in the original incident, deter retaliation, and preserve the integrity of the investigation and resolution process.”

Critics have lambasted the school board, accusing it of covering up the abuse, and parents have said that the school board was complicit in the assault.

Scott Smith, father of the female student assaulted in May, recently announced that prosecutors told him to remain quiet about the case in order to help the case move forward.

Smith complied, but when parents objected to a new trans bathroom policy within the school district, officials denied any incidents of assault.

“The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” Loudoun County Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler said in June. “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”

In its Wednesday statement, the district added that the board was not aware of any details of the accusations.

“School Board members are typically not given details of disciplinary matters,” the statement insisted. “The board may be obligated to consider long-term suspensions or expulsions and must ensure that students have not been deprived of due process. Consequently, members of the Loudon County School Board were not aware of the specific details of this incident until it was reported in media outlets earlier this week.”

You can read more on the background of the case here.

Loudoun County Public Schools claims the school board did not know details of horrific sexual abuse allegations

By CARLOS GARCIA | October 13, 2021

The school district accused of covering up horrific sexual abuse at one of their schools released a lengthy statement Wednesday denying that the school board knew the details of the case.

Loudoun County resident Scott Smith said that his daughter was raped on May 28 by a boy allegedly wearing a skirt in a restroom at Stone Bridge High School. He said that he was told by prosecutors to stay quiet about the case publicly in order to help the prosecution case move forward.

When parents later objected to a new transgender restroom policy at the school district, officials denied any incidents of sexual assault had occurred.

“The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” said Loudoun County Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler in June. “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”

On June 22 at a school board meeting, Smith got into an altercation with a woman who he says was accusing his daughter of lying about the assault. The incident was used by the National School Board Association in their demand to the Department of Justice that threats to school boards be investigated as “domestic violence.”

Although the incident remains under investigation, the details of the horrific accusations were documented in a report by the Daily Wire.

On Wednesday, the school district responded to the controversy in a statement, which cited two assaults.

“Loudoun County Public Schools is aware of the media and social media reports concerning alleged sexual assaults at two of our high school campuses,” the statement read.

Principals are legally required to report to the local law enforcement agency any act, including sexual assault, that may constitute a felony offense,” the statement continued. “That process was followed with respect to these allegations.”

The statement went on to say that LCPS was not allowed to investigate the matter until after a criminal investigation by police is completed.

“Furthermore, LCPS is prohibited from disciplining any student without following the Title IX grievance process, which includes investigating complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault,” the statement added. “LCPS does impose interim measures to protect the safety of students involved in the original incident, deter retaliation, and preserve the integrity of the investigation and resolution process.”

The district went on to say that the board was not aware of the details of the sexual assault accusations.

“School Board members are typically not given details of disciplinary matters. The board may be obligated to consider long-term suspensions or expulsions and must ensure that students have not been deprived of due process,” the statement claimed.

“Consequently, members of the Loudon County School Board were not aware of the specific details of this incident until it was reported in media outlets earlier this week,” the statement concluded. “We are unable to locate any records that indicate that Scott Smith had registered in advance to speak at the June 22, 2021 board meeting.”

Outraged parents demanded the resignation of Superintendent Ziegler at a school board meeting Tuesday after more details of the harrowing case were revealed.

Here’s more about the Loudon schools scandal:

Va. school district claims it followed protocol amid reports 2 girls were sexually assaulted by trans student

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter| Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Loudoun County Schools — A parent speaks at a Loudoun County School Board meeting in Virginia on in October 2021 to demand the resignation of Superintendent Scott Ziegler. | Screenshot: Fox News

A Virginia school district is defending its response to two sexual assault allegations after it was accused of covering up one of the assaults because it raised questions about the potential consequences of a policy passed in August allowing students to use bathrooms based on their gender identity.

Loudoun County Public Schools released a statement Wednesday acknowledging that it is “aware of the media and social media reports concerning alleged sexual assaults at two of our high school campuses.” The district maintained that the proper “process was followed with respect to these allegations.”

On Aug. 10, the Loudoun County School Board approved Policy 8040, allowing trans-identified students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity instead of their biological sex.

The Daily Wire reported the May 28 sexual assault of Scott Smith’s 15-year-old daughter at Loudoun County’s Stone Bridge High School Monday. The publication reported a biological boy who identifies as a girl alleged to have been wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom and sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.

Although juvenile records are sealed, Smith’s lawyer, Elizabeth Lancaster, told the news outlet that the student faces two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy and one count of forcible fellatio related to the incident at school.

As Smith noted during an appearance on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night, a “concerned parent” contacted him and his wife Friday night to ask for the name of the boy who sexually assaulted his daughter.

When Smith refused to divulge that information and asked for the reason behind the inquiry, the caller informed him that “there was another assault at Broad Run High School and the rumor is that it’s the same boy.”

“Within a half an hour, it was confirmed that yes, this did happen,” he added. From there, Smith decided to speak out publicly about what happened to his daughter.

The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office released a statement last week announcing that “a teenager from Ashburn has been charged with sexual battery and abduction of a fellow student at Broad Run High School.”

“The investigation determined on the afternoon of October 6, the 15-year-old suspect forced the victim into an empty classroom where he held her against her will and inappropriately touched her,” the statement from the sheriff’s office reads.

The reaction to The Daily Wire reporting was swift and immediate. In video footage obtained by Fox News, outraged parents confronted the Loudoun County School Board and Superintendent of Schools Scott Ziegler at a school board meeting Tuesday night.

“When is Dr. Ziegler and this board going to be held accountable?” one parent asked. “What did you think was going to happen when you pushed porn into the classrooms and into the libraries and let boys into girls’ bathrooms?”

Another parent maintained that “there is something seriously wrong with a system that prioritizes reporting a rape internally to the superintendent so that they can control the narrative instead of calling the police.” A third parent accused the district of “hiding evidence from every parent in LCPS about a heinous sexual assault of a student that occurred in a bathroom so you could pass radical Policy 8040.”

In its statement Wednesday, Loudoun County Public Schools offered clarification of its responses in the cases of these two sexual assault allegations. The school district contends that police were contacted to investigate the claims of sexual assault.

“Principals are legally required to report to the local law enforcement agency any act, including sexual assault, that may constitute a felony offense [under Virginia law],” the school district’s statement reads. “That process was followed with respect to these allegations.”

The statement further adds that the Loudoun County Sherriff’s Office was “contacted within minutes of receiving the initial report on May 28.”

“Once a matter has been reported to law enforcement, LCPS does not begin its investigation until law enforcement advises LCPS that it has completed the criminal investigation,” the statement continued. “LCPS has cooperated and continues to cooperate with law enforcement.”

The school district stated that it is “prohibited from disciplining any student without following the Title IX grievance process, which includes investigating complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault.”

“LCPS does impose interim measures to protect the safety of students involved in the original incident, deter retaliation, and preserve the integrity of the investigation and resolution process. LCPS has complied and continues to comply with its obligations under Title IX.”

The school district also maintains that members of the school board “were not aware of the specific details of this incident until it was reported in media outlets earlier this week.”

The LCPS statement didn’t address the fact that the perpetrator of the sexual assaults was a trans-identified male and that one of the incidents took place in a girls’ bathroom. The district also declined to weigh in on parental concerns about Policy 8040.

Concerns about Policy 8040 predate the reporting about the May 28 assault on Smith’s daughter.

On June 22, slightly more than three weeks after the sexual assault of Smith’s daughter, a school board meeting in Loudoun County made national headlines as parents forcefully spoke out against a proposed school district policy that would allow trans-identified students to use facilities that correspond with their gender identity.

Scott Smith, whose daughter was raped by a male wearing a skirt in a girls’ bathroom at her high school in Loudoun County, Virginia, appears on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” Oct. 12, 2021. | Screenshot: Fox News

At least two parents were arrested after the meeting was declared an “unlawful assembly.” Smith was one of those parents.

The Daily Wire noted that Smith became the “poster child” for the National School Boards Association’s claims that parent protests of school board policies could be a form of “domestic terrorism” as a result of a viral video showing his arrest.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice directed law enforcement agencies to collaborate on “addressing threats” against school officials after the NSBA requested “federal assistance” to combat what the organization characterized as “domestic terrorism” and “hate crimes.”

In his Fox News appearance Tuesday, Smith accused the Biden of administration of using the video of his arrest at the school board meeting to “weaponize” the government against concerned parents.

Smith also elaborated on the events that led to his arrest. As one of several parents hoping to address the Loudoun County School Board on June 22, Smith and his wife were confronted by a left-wing activist who berated them upon learning that they were there to speak out against the transgender policy. When Smith tried to tell the woman what happened to his daughter, she asserted, “that’s not what happened.” After she vowed to hurt his business by posting unfavorable reviews on social media, Smith called her a “b****.”

From there, law enforcement officials descended on Smith, wrestling him to the ground and causing his lip to bleed. Smith’s wife shouted out, “My child was raped at school, and this is what happens!”

The Daily Wire concluded that the passage of the policy would have been “politically impossible had Smith’s story seen the light of day.” Lancaster agreed, suggesting that “If someone would have sat and listened for 30 seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken.”

While the school district had knowledge of what happened to Smith’s daughter, it assured the public that such incidents had not taken place in Loudoun County.

At the June 22 meeting, Ziegler dismissed the idea of predators taking advantage of policies like Policy 8040 as a “red herring.” He cited a Time Magazine article and asserted that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”

Smith told Fox News that in the weeks following his daughter’s assault and his arrest, he wanted to keep a low profile because “we were under the impression from the prosecutor that this sexual predator was being held on in-house arrest with an ankle monitor and would not return to school until these court sessions were done.”

“I was told by everyone … my attorneys, the prosecuting attorney, friends of the family, people that I don’t even know that if I wanted justice for my daughter, that I needed to keep my mouth quiet and not speak out,” he said. “Because in order to get justice for my daughter, which is the most important thing to me of course, was do not come out and let justice prevail.”

Elaborating on the harm that the incident at Stone Bridge High School caused his family, Smith told Ingraham that as “the school board and the school system just went on summer break and abandoned us, my wife and I had to spend the entire summer … rebuilding our daughter.” He indicated that while his daughter had a “couple … rough nights” and the family endured “Hell,” she is “doing very well.”

“She’s a survivor,” he said. “She’s a winner.”

Smith’s daughter is not the first to have been sexually assaulted in a girls’ bathroom.

Pascha Thomas alleged that in 2017, her 5-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted in a girls’ bathroom at an elementary school in Decatur, Georgia.

“One of her classmates came into her bathroom, a little boy,” Thomas recalled. “She tried to leave the bathroom, [but] the little boy pushed her against the bathroom stall. Basically pinned her up against there. She asked him to stop. He wouldn’t. He took his fingers and he was penetrating her through his pants. She asked him to stop, and stated several times that it hurt. He refused.”

Thomas worked with the legal group Alliance Defending Freedom to file a lawsuit against the school district, contending that its bathroom policy enabled the assault on the then-5-year-old girl to take place.

A poll from Rasmussen Reports released on Wednesday finds that Americans are split in their opinions of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s order for law enforcement to address threats against school boards.

While 44% of likely voters believe that the investigation into alleged threats against school officials is warranted, 47% disagree. Support for investigating threats against school officials stands at 64% among Democrats and 31% among Republicans.

At the same time, 68% of respondents agreed with a statement from Republicans in the U.S. Senate asserting that “the reported heated encounters between concerned parents and school boards often involve speech that is clearly protected by the First Amendment.”

Seventy-eight percent of Republicans agreed with that statement, along with 57% of Democrats and 72% of unaffiliated voters.

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Father details how his young son was convinced he was a ‘transgender lesbian’

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, October 11, 2021

Brenton Netz (L), the concerned father of a child with gender dysphoria, details how his son was convinced that he was a “transgender lesbian” at the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Leesburg, Virginia, Oct. 8, 2021. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge looks on. | Family Research Council

Leesburg, VIRGINIA — A concerned father of a child whose mother is trying to convince her autistic son that he’s a girl is warning about the dangers of “radical gender ideology,” proclaiming that “we must do everything we can to save them from the jaws of this beast.”

On the final day of the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit, a panel of elected officials, journalists and activists addressed a crowd of social conservatives gathered at Cornerstone Chapel. They discussed the extent to which gender ideology has permeated American society. Moderated by Joseph Backholm, the senior fellow for biblical worldview at the Family Research Council, panelists included parent activist Brenton Netz from Michigan, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and The Christian Post journalist Brandon Showalter.

After Backholm mentioned the astronomical rise in the number of cases of gender dysphoria in children, Netz elaborated on his “legal battle to prevent his son from being given experimental gender transition” drugs, such as puberty blockers, against his will. Netz recalled the shock he felt upon reading notes from his then-8-year-old son’s therapy session with a gender clinician in St. Cloud, Minnesota, who asserted that “Miles reports her sexual orientation as lesbian” and “she reports her gender as transgender female.”

Netz described his son as a “vulnerable child” who was “diagnosed with autism at the age of 4” with “an obsessive personality” and “other real behavioral issues.” He criticized the therapist who treated his son, Troy Weber-Brown, for referring to his “autistic son as a girl named Miley using she/her and them/their pronouns.” Weber-Brown is a licensed family and marriage therapist who specializes in LGBTQ behavioral healthcare.

The father condemned the “appalling way he (Weber-Brown) counsels troubled and vulnerable children,” adding “his stated goal is to re-parent them.”

“In my case, Troy set himself up as my son’s surrogate father,” Netz said. “He meticulously manipulated my son into thinking he was not only a transgender girl and lesbian, but they were also having structured discussions about irreversible hormones and surgical options.”
“There is no way my autistic little boy voluntarily self-identified as a transgender lesbian unless he was convinced of that by an adult,” he asserted.
Netz noted that during the therapy sessions, his son’s “crotch area was examined to see how much pubic hair he had to determine if he reached the beginning stages of puberty so a referral for hormone blockers could be written.”
Netz lamented that the medical establishment and family courts have been “steadily corrupted by … postmodern gender ideology.” He concluded his opening remarks with a call to action.
“Our kids are under attack,” he said. “We must do everything we can to save them from the jaws of this beast.”
Netz identified himself as “the only adult in my son’s life who is not affirming … his delusion.”
“[T]he schools are calling him Miley. … Everybody in the medical establishment treats him as a girl, calls him Miley,” he explained.
“In our case, what has happened is there’s kind of this gridlock that happens because the medical establishment will say well, it’s a family court issue. … You can get this solved by going to the family court. Then you go to the family court, and they can’t solve it either.”
As a divorced parent, Netz has custody of his son “every other weekend plus a lot more time in the summer.”
“If anybody met my son, within the first five minutes, you would realize that … he’s incapable of coming to those conclusions.”

Backholm attempted to explain the reasons behind the increased prominence of children with gender dysphoria and the push to “affirm” children in their chosen gender identities. He cited reporting from Abigail Shrier, journalist and author of the book, Irreversible Damage. Shrier interviewed “a former Planned Parenthood employee … about the decisions … at Planned Parenthood about whether a child should receive cross-sex hormones.” The former Planned Parenthood employee told Shrier that those decisions were made by a clinic manager who had “no prior medical experience and whose former job was managing at Wendy’s.”

The former employee characterized children with gender dysphoria as “cash cows” because, in many cases, “they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc.”

While Planned Parenthood is known for performing abortions, the former employee said that “abortions are hopefully a one-and-done situation.” By contrast, children with gender dysphoria are seen as longterm potential customers, giving the organization a financial incentive.

Netz agreed that every child is vulnerable prey for agenda-driven gender clinicians.

“They will diagnose that child with gender dysphoria. … If they can do it to my son, they can do it to any child.”

Backholm held up the SAFE Act as an example of a legislative solution to combat the harm of “radical gender ideology,” including cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. SAFE is an acronym for the Saving Adolescents from Experimentation Act. He cheered Arkansas for becoming the first state to pass the “model legislation that prohibits the gender transition procedures or chemicals being given to minors.”

Rutledge informed the audience that she was “wholeheartedly defending the SAFE Act.” Netz offered praise for the SAFE Act as “a necessary measure to protect children from this mess.”

Showalter illustrated how Netz’s situation is not unique.

“I have never heard such excruciating anguish from moms and dads who somehow manage to find my journalistic work at The Christian Post.” He added that “many of them are not even Christians, they’re not conservative. I’ve received phone calls from atheists, left-wing people who say they can’t believe they’re reading CP now.”

Showalter has engaged in several conversations with parents experiencing “off-the-charts pain and anguish as they are forced to watch the slow-motion dissociation and chemical disintegration of their own children.”

He told the story of a mother who had an 18-year-old daughter with a developmental delay. The daughter went to Planned Parenthood and was given a prescription for testosterone “based on her own self-diagnosis” within 30 minutes.

“So this mom wanted to see how easy it would be for her to get testosterone” as a 50-something, he added. “She was given testosterone within 30 minutes. All they had to do was take the blood pressure, did a finger prick (blood test), and she declared herself the opposite sex, and all she had to do was sign an informed consent document that she shared with me.”

Rutledge also commented on how illogical it was to allow children to choose their gender while not allowing them to make other significant decisions such as voting and serving in the military. She also stressed that “kids are not even taken into consideration when their parents are getting a divorce as to … which parent they want to live with.”

“Why is it OK now for these medical providers and courts to push forward and allow these children to make life-altering, permanent decisions that are irreversible?” she asked.

As The Daily Wire reported, Netz is considering filing a lawsuit against the gender clinic that has convinced his young son that he is a trans-identified lesbian. Last year, Netz successfully obtained a court order to prevent his son, who’s now 11 years old, from receiving further “gender-affirming” treatment at the clinic.

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

Category:

Education, Family, Political, Spiritual

Tagged with:

3,000 healthcare workers sue Biden admin. over mandate forcing them to perform sex-change surgeries

Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Tuesday, August 31, 2021

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra speaks outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., November 12, 2019. | SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Two associations representing 3,000 medical professionals and an individual doctor based in Tennessee have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s Transgender Mandate, arguing that it violates federal conscience protection laws. The American College of Pediatricians and the Catholic Medical Association, along with Dr. Jeanie Dassow of Chattanooga, filed the suit last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

At issue in the court case is the HHS’ current interpretation of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which bars sex discrimination, to include requiring doctors to perform elective gender-transition procedures, including cosmetic surgeries such as double mastectomies, phalloplasties and orchiectomies (testicle removal).

Defendants named in the suit include the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, the HHS Office for Civil Rights and Robinsue Frohboese, acting director and principal deputy in the HHS OCR.

“This case challenges whether the federal government can make medical doctors perform gender-transition surgeries, prescribe gender-transition drugs, and speak and write about patients according to gender identity, rather than biological reality—regardless of doctors’ medical judgment or conscientious objections,” noted the introduction of the lawsuit.

The suit argues that the HHS rule, known as the Transgender Mandate, violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Free Exercise of Religion Clauses.

HHS first announced its revised interpretation of the statute in May. The so-called Transgender Surgery Mandate was first implemented by HHS under former President Barack Obama in 2016, but the Trump administration repealed the mandate in 2018.

“It is the position of the Department of Health and Human Services that everyone – including LGBTQ people – should be able to access health care, free from discrimination or interference, period,” said Becerra in the announcement.
Becerra warned that fears over discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity “can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences.”

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Ryan Bangert, who is helping to represent the plaintiffs, said in a statement released Thursday that the HHS was “grossly overreaching its authority” by issuing the mandate.

“Forcing doctors to prescribe transition hormones for 13-year-olds or perform life-altering surgeries on adolescents is unlawful, unethical, and dangerous,” stated Bangert.
“Our clients are rightfully objecting on medical, ethical, religious, and conscientious grounds to this unlawful government mandate to provide gender-transition procedures.”

To justify their interpretation, HHS pointed to the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the high court ruled 6-3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied to sexual orientation and gender identity, even though neither category is specifically mentioned in the federal law: “The Supreme Court has made clear that people have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex and receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion for the Bostock decision, concluding that “The statute’s message for our cases is equally simple and momentous: An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions.”
“That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” he continued.

Over the years, the Transgender Mandate has been the subject of multiple lawsuits, including one filed by the Franciscan Alliance, a network of Catholic hospitals in Texas.

On Aug. 9, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas, appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush, granted a permanent injunction against the HHS mandate on behalf of the Franciscan Alliance.

O’Connor concluded that the mandate violated RFRA by unjustly harming the plaintiffs’ religious practices. He specifically contended that the mandate used threats of “fines and civil liability” to “coerce them to perform and provide insurance coverage for gender-transition procedures and abortions.”
“When the RFRA violation is clear and the threat of irreparable harm is present, a permanent injunction exempting Christian Plaintiffs from that religion-burdening conduct is the appropriate relief,” he added.

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Michael Brown Op-ed: Why a Virginia middle school is removing urinals from the boys’ bathrooms

Commentary By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor | Monday, August 23, 2021

It’s bad enough that a middle school in Loudon County, Virginia, has decided to remove “male” and “female” signs from its bathrooms. But in an even more extreme nod to social insanity, this same school is removing the urinals from the boys’ bathrooms. Why? It’s because a number of biological females, who identify as males, are offended by the presence of urinals.

So rather than point out to these females that they are not really males (otherwise, they’d have no problems with urinals), the school turns the world upside down to accommodate them.

This is the direct result of school policy 8040, which states, “LCPS staff shall allow gender-expansive or transgender students to use their chosen name and gender pronouns that reflect their gender identity without any substantiating evidence, regardless of the name and gender recorded in the student’s permanent educational record.”

So, no substantiating evidence is needed, and, the policy states, all teachers must comply with the students wishes.

In other words, impressionable students, including young children who haven’t the foggiest idea about sexual and gender realities, can simply declare their new identity, and the school must change their records accordingly. And woe be to the teacher or administrator who dares question this cultural madness.

Appropriately enough, the policy is titled, “Rights of Transgender and Gender-Expansive Students.” Gender-expansive? What does that even mean? Welcome to the new reality.

Of course, the problem with this new reality is that it has nothing to do with reality at all.

A biological boy who calls himself a girl is still a boy, and vice versa, no matter how much compassion we want to show them in the midst of their gender confusion. That’s why that girl cannot use a urinal: because she is not a boy. And saying this is neither hateful nor bigoted. It’s simply telling the truth.

But alas, we live in an age when truth has been displaced by perception, resulting in men’s bathrooms on college campuses having tampons on hand, because “men can menstruate.” And “breastfeeding” is replaced by “chestfeeding,” lest “men” breastfeeding their children feel offended.

And when you read stories stating, “When Jesse Ballard found out he was pregnant, he was shocked yet excited.” (Jesse, the “husband,” is the biological female, impregnated by his “wife,” who is the biological male.) And this is something we are supposed to celebrate. In reality, for all involved, it is heartbreaking. Surely, God has a better way.

Unfortunately, these decisions do not only affect the individuals making choices for themselves. Instead, they affect others living or working or going to school with them.

As David Kubal pointed out in his article about the urinals being removed from a school in his district, the perceived needs of roughly 0.3% of the population, now turn the world upside down for the other 99.7%.

Accordingly, he writes, because of this tiny percentage of people in Loudoun County:

46,000 junior high and high school students were given permission, by the school system, to believe they may not be a male or female as their chromosomes have determined by God’s design.
23,000 young women will be required to share a bathroom and locker room with young men.
Thousands of young women’s positions on teams are now in jeopardy by men who are now allowed to participate in female sports on female teams.
These school bathrooms may now become the scene of sexual assault and sexual immorality in ways that will mark the lives of these young men and women forever.
Teachers will have to remember a person’s desired pronouns or other “gender-expansive” terminology (I must confess, I have never heard this term, nor do I know what it means).

That’s why, in 2011 in the context of the trajectory of LGBT activism, I asked, “How far have we already deviated from the path? Where will this current trajectory take us? If our college kids can describe themselves as ‘genderqueer dykes’ and ‘transgender gay males,’ what is coming next? How about the ‘trans child’? How about ‘queer in the crib’?”

How about the bathrooms in your children’s schools removing male or female identification and all urinals removed lest they offend biological females who identify as males?

The reality is that, based on where things have been going for several decades now, none of this should surprise us. The big question should be: if we don’t stand together and help turn the tide, what’s coming next?

I’m all for helping kids who are deeply confused about their gender identity and suffering real internal pain. I’m also sure that the current LGBT trajectories will do far more harm than good. Can we not all see where this is going now?

Dr. Michael Brown (www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He is the author of 40 books. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Hobby Lobby ordered to pay $220K for not allowing trans employee to use women’s restroom

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter| Wednesday, August 18, 2021

A state court has ordered the Christian-owned craft store chain Hobby Lobby to pay over $200,000 in fines for refusing to allow one of its trans-identified employees to use the women’s bathroom. A three-judge Illinois appellate court panel unanimously ruled Friday that Hobby Lobby violated the Illinois Human Rights Act by declining to allow one of its employees to use the bathroom that corresponds with the person’s gender identity instead of biological sex.

Friday’s ruling reinforces an earlier conclusion of the Illinois Human Rights Commission. The company was ordered to pay its longtime employee $220,000 in attorneys’ fees for “emotional distress.” The company argued the fine was excessive. However, the court did not find Hobby Lobby’s arguments persuasive.

The retail chain, owned by the Green family, has become known for its adherence to Christian principles. As explained in the decision, the employee, a biological male who now identifies as Meggan Sommerville, began working for Hobby Lobby in 1998. In 2007, while working as an employee of the Hobby Lobby in East Aurora, Sommerville began to transition from male to female.

The transition became official in 2010 when Sommerville “formally informed Hobby Lobby of her transition and her intent to begin using the women’s bathroom at the store.” Sommerville presented the store with an updated driver’s license, Social Security card and name change court order. Although Hobby Lobby changed Sommerville’s personnel records and benefits information to reflect a “female identity,” the store never allowed the employee to use the women’s restroom over the past decade. Sommerville has faced disciplinary action for using the women’s bathroom.

The East Aurora store did install a unisex restroom in 2013, enabling store employees and customers to “use either the bathroom corresponding to their [biological sex] or the unisex bathroom.” Sommerville contended, however, that being forced to use the unisex bathroom made it seem as if “they were segregating me,” adding, “I felt as though there were the guys, the gals, and then me.”

“Hobby Lobby’s provision of a unisex bathroom available to all employees and customers cannot cure its unequal treatment of Sommerville with respect to the women’s bathroom,” the court maintained. “If every employee and customer except Sommerville may use either the unisex bathroom or the bathroom corresponding to their sex, but Sommerville’s choices are limited to the unisex bathroom or a bathroom that does not correspond to her sex, Hobby Lobby is still discriminating unlawfully.”

Sommerville alleged that the inability to use the women’s restroom led to severe mental anguish, and the court agreed. It ruled that Hobby Lobby’s actions violated a law barring “discrimination against any individual because of his or her … [sex], or sexual orientation … in connection with employment … and the ability of public accommodations.”

Additionally, the law makes it illegal for “any employer to … segregate, or act with respect to … discipline … or terms, privileges or conditions of employment on the basis of unlawful discrimination” and for places of public accommodation to “deny or refuse to another the full and equal enjoyment of the facilities.”

The court emphasized that “discrimination against a person because of his or her actual perceived … sex … [or] sexual orientation” constitutes “unlawful discrimination.”

“Hobby Lobby’s conduct thus falls squarely within the definition of unlawful discrimination under the Act, as it treats Sommerville differently from all other women who work or shop at its store, solely on the basis that her gender identity is not ‘traditionally associated with’ her ‘designated sex at birth,’” the court argued. “The Commission did not err in finding that Hobby Lobby’s conduct of denying Sommerville access to its women’s bathroom violated her civil rights under articles 2 and 5 of the Act.”

While the court’s opinion never discussed Hobby Lobby’s Christian faith or religious beliefs, it did mention that the arts-and-crafts chain sees “an individual’s ‘sex’ — the status of being male or female” as “an immutable condition.”

Hobby Lobby gained national recognition for citing its religious beliefs when objecting to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The mandate forced employers to cover their employees’ birth control in employer-sponsored healthcare packages.

Hobby Lobby asserted that providing its employees with contraception coverage, including abortion-inducing drugs, would violate the company’s sincerely held religious beliefs.

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell that companies could refuse to provide contraception for their employees if doing so violated their religious beliefs.

The Illinois appellate court’s ruling against Hobby Lobby comes as congressional Democrats are pushing for the passage of the Equality Act, which would enshrine nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community into federal law. The language of the Equality Act is similar to that of the Illinois Human Rights Act. Many conservatives have expressed concern about its implications for religious liberty.

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Virginia school district passes controversial policy forcing teachers to use trans pronouns

Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, August 12, 2021

Transgender — A sign outside a classroom taken in 2016. | REUTERS/Tami Chappell

A Virginia school district has passed a new policy that, among other things, allows trans-identified students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity and requires teachers to refer to students by their preferred names and pronouns. The Loudoun County School Board voted 7-2 on Wednesday to approve Policy 8040: Rights of Transgender and Gender-Expansive Students despite considerable opposition to the proposal.

Among its provisions, Policy 8040 requires that school faculty and staff use the chosen name and pronouns of a student who identifies as “gender-expansive or transgender.”

“School staff shall, at the request of a student or parent/legal guardian, when using a name or pronoun to address the student, use the name and pronoun that correspond to their consistently asserted gender identity,” reads the policy.
“The use of gender-neutral pronouns is appropriate. Inadvertent slips in the use of names or pronouns may occur; however, staff or students who intentionally and persistently refuse to respect a student’s gender identity by using the wrong name and gender pronoun are in violation of this policy.”

The policy also allows students to use the restroom or locker room “that corresponds to their consistently asserted gender identity,” noting that school administrators should consider adding “gender-inclusive or single-user restrooms” for additional privacy.

The school board also provided a frequently-asked-questions document on the new guidelines and their implementation. The page notes that while there will still be facilities explicitly marked for males and females, LCPS plans “to improve student privacy and to promote the creation of single-user restrooms that are available to all students in a ratio appropriate for the enrollment and size of the school.”

According to the FAQ document, LCPS recommended that school staff “make efforts to eliminate gender-based practices to the extent possible,” claiming that such practices “can have the effect of marginalizing, stigmatizing, and excluding students, regardless of their gender identity or gender expression.”

“Examples of practices that may be based on gender, and which should be eliminated, include grouping students for class activities, gender-based homecoming or prom courts, limitations on who can attend as ‘couples’ at school dances, and gender-based events such as father-daughter dances,” continued the FAQ document.

Critics of the controversial policy include Loudoun County School Board member Jeffrey Morse.

“The policy is not needed. The policy does not solve the issues that it’s purported to solve. The policy has forced our focus out of education and I will not support it,” stated Morse, as reported by Fox 5.

The policy garnered national attention when Bryon Tanner Cross, a teacher at Leesburg Elementary School, was suspended by LCPS for speaking out against the proposed policy at a school board meeting in May. During the public comments section of the meeting, Cross told the board that as a Christian, he was unable to “affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa.”

“My name is Tanner Cross, and I am speaking out of love for those who suffer with gender dysphoria,” stated Cross at the meeting. “I love all of my students, but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences.”

Cross sued the school district in response to the suspension, with a judge granting the Christian teacher a temporary injunction for his reinstatement in June. LCPS is appealing the decision.

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

‘If you are born with a d**k, you are not a chick’: Shop owner doesn’t back down when trans council member complains about sign; store’s Google reviews skyrocket

Reported by SARAH TAYLOR | August 06, 2021

Image source: YouTube screenshot

An altercation between an Aberdeen, Washington, business owner and a transgender council member made headlines after the two engaged in a screaming match over a sign in the business owner’s shop that reads “If you are born with a d**k, you are not a chick.”

According to a Thursday report from KING-TV, Council member Tiesa Meskis, who identifies as a transgender woman, confronted Sucher & Sons Star Wars Shop owner Don Sucher over what Meskis said was a transphobic and bigoted a sign hanging in Sucher’s store. The exchange between the two was captured on video and soon went viral.

In the video, Sucher said, “Let me tell you this. You are f***ed in the head. You are f***ed in the head. You are an embarrassment to the community.”

“I think you need to look in the mirror when you say that,” Meskis fired back.about:blank

Sucher stepped back and gestures toward Meskis, saying, “Well look at yourself, for Christ’s sake. … You are not a f***ing chick! Do you still have a d**k? ‘Cause if you do, guess what—”

Meskis responded, “You know what, that is none of your f***ing business.”

“Do you think that there’s one person who really thinks that you’re a chick?” Sucher continued. “Nobody confronts you, that’s the problem. Why are you doing this?”

“This is who I am,” Meskis seethed.

Sucher waved off the response and said, “F*** that s**t. F*** that s**t!”

“It doesn’t mean that you can put up a sign like that,” Meskis continued.

Sucher said that Meskis makes him uncomfortable and told the trans woman to leave the store.

As Meskis exited, Sucher followed and said, “You’re f***ing nuts.”

“Trans women are women!” Meskis shouted back in defiance and began chanting the phrase from the sidewalk outside of Sucher’s store. The two continued shouting at each other for several more minutes before Meskis walked away shouting, “Stop staring at my ass!”

Content warning: Rough language:

Meskis told KING, “What he wrote [in the sign] was so demeaning and so dismissive of who I am, who any trans woman is.”

“I don’t care what they do, but don’t come in here and complain to me about stuff,” Sucher told the station. “I have free speech.”

Both say that they have received messages of support from around the country.

“Everybody’s loved it,” Sucher said about the sign. “Everybody’s taken pictures of it. … I don’t give a [expletive] about feelings anymore. I went to Vietnam to fight for all this [expletive]. Do you think I care about something [expletive] feeling? Absolutely not!”

Meskis said that her supporters plan to demonstrate at 10 a.m. Saturday outside of Sucher’s store. Apparent supporters of Sucher took to Google to leave glowing reviews for the elderly business owner. One reviewer wrote, “Thank you for taking a stand against this misogynistic war. You are speaking reality and for the majority!”

Another added, “Great experience and an excellent owner — and Vietnam Veteran — who stands up for what he believes in (which is medically-accurate reality). If you like keeping your sci-fi as entertainment, rather than letting the delusions of the mentally unhinged bleed into the real world, support Normals.”

“Here from NY just to show support for great Americans such as yourself. Thank you for being you, Sir!” another reviewer added.

At the time of this reporting, Sucher’s store has received more than 1,700 reviews tallying up to a 4.8 out of 5 rating.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Court orders ‘Save James’ boy to stay with mother who says he’s a girl, gives father limited visitation

Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Thursday, August 05, 2021

James Younger with father Jeffrey — James Younger with his father, Jeffrey Younger. | Screenshot: YouTube

A court in Texas has ruled that a boy at the center of a custody battle will temporarily live with his mother, who wants to have him undergo a gender transition to look more like a girl, while the father, who opposes it, will only be allowed limited visitation.

For the past couple of years, Jeff Younger and his ex-wife, Anne Georgulas — a pediatrician in Coppell, Texas, and non-biological mother of James and his twin brother, Jude — have fought over who has custody over their son, James, whom Georgulas calls “Luna” and wants to see transitioned into a girl.

In a memorandum ruling issued Tuesday, Judge Mary Brown ruled against Younger, citing his purported “unwillingness or inability to follow the order designed to serve the best interests of the children.” The court gave Georgulas various “exclusive rights on a temporary basis,” including the right to establish the children’s primary residence, the right to consent to various medical decisions, the right to determine their education, and a host of other privileges. Brown did, however, stop short of giving Georgulas the exclusive right to have James undergo experimental trans procedures such as prescribing puberty blockers or hormonal suppression “without the consent of the parents or court order.”

In addition, the court required that “Younger’s possession periods shall be continuously supervised by Forensic Counseling Services … at Mr. Younger’s sole cost and expense.”

The Facebook page “Save James” denounced the court order, saying in a statement Wednesday that it “ruled against the safety and protection of James and Jude.”

In October 2019, a Dallas jury ruled 11-1 to not give Younger sole conservatorship of his twin sons, opening to the possibility that James might undergo gender transition at the insistence of Georgulas. Georgulas filed a court petition requiring Younger to accept James as “Luna,” with her claiming that James himself has affirmed a preference to identify as female.

“When James is with me, he shows no signs of wanting to be a girl when given the choice. Even when in female company, away from me, James rejects a female gender expression,” stated Younger in an entry on the “Save James” website.

During court proceedings, Younger has argued that his son prefers to identify as a boy and reportedly threw out a bunch of dresses that his mother had bought him.

The highly publicized custody battle prompted some Texas state lawmakers to sponsor a bill that would ban the medicalized gender-transitioning of children; however, the measure died when it failed to be scheduled for a vote in the House of Representatives.

Category:

Political, Spiritual

Tagged with:

Trans-identified Olympian eliminated from women’s weightlifting competition, fails to register lift

Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, August 02, 2021

A biological male who identifies as female was eliminated from women’s weightlifting at the Tokyo Olympics after failing three attempts in the women’s 87+ kilogram competition but still made history as the first trans-identified individual to compete in the Olympic Games.

Laurel Hubbard, a 43-year-old transgender weightlifter from New Zealand, failed three attempts in the snatch category and was knocked out of the competition as a result, reported Yahoo Sports on Monday.

“Thank you so very much for your interest in my humble sporting performance tonight,” Hubbard told reporters. “I know from a sporting perspective I did not live up to the standards I put upon myself.”
“[The International Olympic Committee has] been extraordinarily supportive and I think that they have reaffirmed the principles of the Olympics that sport is something that all people around the world can do, that it is inclusive and successful.”

Hubbard, who has competed against biologically female athletes for years, made headlines in June for reportedly being the first trans-identified athlete to qualify for the Olympics. Hubbard transitioned to a female at the age of 35. New Zealand Olympic Committee CEO Kereyn Smith said in a statement at the time that Hubbard had met the qualifications to join the South Pacific nation’s weightlifting team.

“We acknowledge that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play,” stated Smith.
“We are committed to supporting all eligible New Zealand athletes and ensuring their mental and physical wellbeing, along with their high-performance needs, while preparing for and competing at the Olympic Games are met.”

At the 2019 Pacific Games, Hubbard won gold by defeating two women from Samoa by lifting 268 kilograms, 7 kilograms more than the silver medal winner.

Beth Stelzer, a weightlifter and founder of Save Women’s Sports, an activist group opposed to allowing biologically male athletes to compete in female athletic competitions, denounced the decision to allow Hubbard to compete against women at the Olympics as “shameful” and “a mockery of the sport.”

“We cannot change our sex. A male cannot become a female by lowering their testosterone. Women are not a hormone level,” Stelzer said in a statement emailed to The Christian Post in June.
“Identities do not play sports; bodies play sports. The rights of females should not end where the feelings of a few males begin.”

News of Hubbard’s elimination comes as the IOC is considering revisions to its policy regarding the participation of transgender athletes, especially biological males participating in women’s competitions. Hubbard qualified under the IOC’s 2015 guidelines, which allowed the lifter to compete without a sex change surgery as long as drugs are taken to lower testosterone to below 10 nanomoles per liter for 12 months.

IOC’s medical and science director Dr. Richard Budgett recently said that 2015 guidelines were no longer backed by science, according to The Guardian.

“At the time the 10 nanomoles per liter was set because we thought that was the lower level for men,” Budgett was quoted as saying. “We know now that they go down to seven and women can be higher as well. Agreeing on another number is almost impossible and possibly irrelevant. You can debate that endlessly.”
Budgett said that the IOC wants to “increase inclusion in sport as one of the fundamentals, but at the same time our highest, highest priority is fairness.”

Katie Mascagni, the IOC’s head of public affairs, told Yahoo Sports that in some sports, “testosterone or other aspects come into play in order to justify the reasons there is a disproportionate advantage.” But in other contexts, she said those factors might “be totally irrelevant.”

On social media, LGBT activist and bestselling author Amanda Jetté Knox used Hubbard’s Olympic result to bash arguments from those who oppose trans-identified individuals competing in women’s sports. She stated that Hubbard “was eliminated from competition after not performing as well as the cis athletes who will be competing in the Olympic finals.”

“B-b-but how is she going to grab all the gold medals with her ‘unfair advantage’?!” Knox wrote on Twitter.

The activist group Fair Play for Women stressed, however, that Hubbard’s ability to qualify for the Olympics resulted in a biological female not having the opportunity to participate in the Tokyo Games.

“This is Roviel Detenamo. She should be at Tokyo 2020 today but she’ll be watching the games from home because the IOC rules allowed a male person to compete in her female category,” the organization tweeted Monday.

Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

Category:

Political, Sports

Tagged with:

Graphic Content Warning: Crowd Gasps as Fed-Up Parents Read School’s Pornographic Books Out Loud at Board Meeting

Reported by Christine Favocci | July 30, 2021

If there’s one good thing that came out of school closures, it’s that parents finally had a window into what their kids were being exposed to in the classroom — and many were horrified by what they saw.

That’s exactly what happened in Carmel, Indiana, where parents learned the full scope of the perversion being peddled to their children. The school libraries there are filled with storybooks pushing radical transgender ideology, lessons on masturbation for middle schoolers, and novels with explicit sexual scenes including one describing a bloody rape.

At a meeting of the Carmel Clay School Board on Monday, outraged parents took turns reading excerpts from these materials. They are so objectionable that it’s necessary to issue more than our usual warning of graphic content. Watch at your own risk — but keep in mind, this smut is being made available to schoolchildren.

WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.

One parent spoke out against the “global campaign to promote sexualized material to grade school children which is heralded by the UN, championed by Planned Parenthood and is now making its way into the Carmel schools.”

She noted some of the titles available at elementary schools, including “Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship,” which uses a teddy bear to teach kids that gender isn’t determined by biology. There is also “Sparkle Boy,” about a toddler’s cross-dressing tendencies, and “Call Me Max,” in which a kindergarten girl gets a teacher to call her by a boy’s name.

(Whatever happened to reading Dr. Seuss books to schoolchildren? Oh, right — canceled by the woke mob.)

Another parent read from a novel available to Carmel high schoolers that includes a pornographic scene explicitly describing characters engaged in various sex acts. It’s too obscene to even summarize.

A third parent read from the book “It’s Perfectly Normal,” which is available to middle school children and promoted by Planned Parenthood. It teaches kids how to masturbate and is filled with nitty-gritty details.

A book called “Crank” details a disturbing rape that transpires when a young couple goes into the woods to get drunk and high on meth.

“If I had known you were just going to lay there, I wouldn’t have bothered,” the rapist tells his victim on the car ride home.

The video of Monday’s school board meeting was uploaded to YouTube by the group Unify Carmel, which is raising the alarm on the wokeism pervading the city’s public schools.

Alvin Lui, a parent activist, told WIBC in May that he fled California to escape radical leftist ideology — only to find it in his new home in Indiana.

“If I [raised] my daughter in California, the schools and the culture there would teach her that her two most important things in life [are] that she’s Asian and she’s female,” he said.

Lui said he began to worry about his daughter’s new school when he saw ideas like critical race theory make their way into the curriculum, a change that no doubt came about when the district hired its first “diversity, equity and inclusion officer” in January.

“We saw a lot of little things before other people saw it because we’ve lived through it previously,” Lui said. “So for my wife and I, it kind of feels like we’re living through that same nightmare all over again except in the very beginning.”

Parents have already begun pushing back against other items on the woke agenda, but Monday’s meeting in Carmel revealed the sexual indecency introduced to children in public schools.

“If I were to read it to you, you wouldn’t be able to air it because it would be against FCC obscenity laws,” Lui told WXIN-TV. “Everyone was uncomfortable, and these are adults.”

To his credit, Carmel Clay Superintendent Dr. Michael Beresford said he wasn’t aware of the books until the meeting and pledged to look into them. Carmel certainly isn’t the only place where so-called educators are sexualizing children — leftists are hard at work across the country. They know that sexually active kids make great abortion clients for Planned Parenthood and turn into Democratic voters when they become impoverished single parents.

Transgender advocates know that if they can get a hold of kindergarten minds, they can recruit a generation of confused children. The doctors who prescribe the puberty blockers and perform the “transition” surgeries can get that much richer.

Beyond the political sphere, what we have here is a battle for the hearts and souls of American children. This perversion tailored to kids stems from a diabolical determination to spoil their innocence and set them up for a life of servitude to sin. Whether they know it or not, the teachers giving smut to their students are cooperating with the dark powers that would turn us away from God by shackling us to our basest desires. There’s no surer way to do that than to expose children to this filth early and often.

Americans now have the opportunity to see and hear exactly what’s going on in public schools — and it’s our job to do exactly what these parents did on Monday.

Christine Favocci

Christine earned her bachelor’s degree from Seton Hall University, where she studied communications and Latin. She left her career in the insurance industry to become a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother.@CFavocci Facebook

Category:

Education, Political

Tagged with:

Judge blocks Arkansas law banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender surgery for kids

Reported By Brandon Showalter, Christian Post Reporter | Friday, July 23, 2021

Arkansas Capitol — Arkansas flag flying high beside the Arkansas state Capitol, front exterior, in Little Rock, Arkansas. | Getty Images

A federal judge has temporarily blocked an Arkansas law banning the use of experimental drugs and gender-transition surgeries on minors, which was set to take effect next week in the state. The law, called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, was adopted earlier this year in the southern state after lawmakers overrode Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s veto of the bill. Hutchinson, a Republican, said in April that the measure was “extreme” and “overbroad” and that it could not be defended on limited government grounds. The law was scheduled to be enacted on July 28.

Led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, he and Republican attorneys general of 17 states — Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas — filed an amicus brief in federal court last Tuesday in support of the Arkansas law.

Wednesday’s judicial injunction against the law comes as four trans-identifying young people, two doctors, and the American Civil Liberties Union came together to file a lawsuit against the state, arguing that the statute violates their constitutional rights. The judge said that their motions could indeed be successful at trial.

“CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS”?????????? What constitutional rights? Where did the Founding Father’s write down that it is the right of adults to have children be mutilated by agenda other driven adults?

“To pull this care midstream from these patients, or minors, would cause irreparable harm,” U.S. District Judge Jay Moody, who issued the ruling, said in a statement.

Praising the decision, Holly Dickson, the executive director of the Arkansas chapter of the ACLU, said the ruling sends a message to other states that her organization will not allow the medicalized gender transitioning of children to be taken away from youth.

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, a Republican, intends to appeal the ruling, promising to defend the law.

“I will not sit idly by while radical groups such as the ACLU use our children as pawns for their own social agenda,” she said.

Likewise, family advocates in favor of the law said they believe the truth about the nature of these contested medical practices and procedures will eventually win out.

“We are disappointed but not surprised that a judge has placed a temporary hold on the Arkansas law that protects children from unscientific, experimental, and destructive gender transition procedures. However, we are confident that ultimately state lawmakers will remain free to protect the health and safety of children,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, in a statement emailed to The Christian Post.

“The legal challenge to this law is being mounted by a political movement that advocates for using off-label drugs and experimental procedures on minors. Yet a growing number of individuals are coming forward to share their stories of being permanently disfigured and/or sterilized from procedures such as puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries. The truth about the dangers of these life-altering procedures cannot be ignored,” he said.

The intensifying legal disputes in the United States regarding the medicalization of gender, especially as it pertains to minors, comes as European nations are moving away from the experimental practices.

Late last year, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom ruled in a judicial review that children younger than 16 are unlikely to be mature enough to consent to taking irreversible chemical puberty-blocking drugs given the significant risks and repercussions to their health. The ruling is presently being appealed, and a subsequent decision in March held that parents could give consent on behalf of their minor children.

Earlier this year in Sweden, the prominent Karolinska Hospital said that as of April 1, puberty blockers would no longer be given to youth younger than 16, and their statement referenced the U.K. ruling as part of their rationale.

In June of last year, health authorities in Finland revised their professional guidelines by prioritizing psychological help and support over experimental medicine, especially for young people whose gender dysphoria came about after puberty.

Send news tips to: brandon.showalter@christianpost.com Listen to Brandon Showalter’s Life in the Kingdom podcast at The Christian Post and edifi app Follow Brandon Showalter on Facebook: BrandonMarkShowalter Follow on Twitter: @BrandonMShow

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Transgender’

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Wisconsin’s premier children’s hospital has had its fair share of scandal, particularly with regard to religious liberty and leadership, but the bar just keeps getting lower: Children’s Wisconsin is now hiring trans activists as chaplains and “spiritual care interns.”

Share this:

Like this:

BY: PAULA RINEHART | NOVEMBER 07, 2022

‘I’m God in this Case’

A Pernicious Double Standard

The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights

Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.

Share this:

Like this:

By SARAH WEAVER, STAFF WRITER | October 28, 2022

Share this:

Like this:

Trans Activists Offer Gender-Confused Minors Cash And Uber Rides To Get Them Away From Home

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother, author, and member of the Independent Women’s Network.

Share this:

Like this:

By CANDACE HATHAWAY | October 24, 2022

Share this:

Like this:

By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com

Share this:

Like this:

Michigan Is Hiding A Children’s Constitutional Right To Genital Amputation In Its Abortion Amendment

It’s Right in the Text

Prop 3 Applies to Men and Women AND Boys and Girls

The rights of parents do not matter; Mom and Dad have no rights. And even the health of the girl does not matter because, under the plain language of the amendment, the state’s interest cannot “infringe” on the “individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

Planned Parenthood Targets Kids One Way or Another

With less than one month to go before Michiganders cast their final ballots, little time remains to give proof to the left’s lie that Prop 3 is about codifying Roe. It is not. It is about sacrificing the children of the state — both born and unborn.

Share this:

Like this:

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

Share this:

Like this:

By REAGAN REESE, CONTRIBUTOR | September 29, 2022

Share this:

Like this:

By REAGAN REESE, CONTRIBUTOR | September 29, 2022

Share this:

Like this:

BY: JORDAN BOYD | SEPTEMBER 28, 2022

Social Contagion

Beyond the Screen

All Hope Is Not Lost

Helena, Cat, and Grace will be labeled transphobic and hateful for speaking up, but their transparency offers a message of warning and of hope for real care that parents, policymakers, and people all around the world need to hear: Mangling healthy bodies is a sickness, not a cure.

Share this:

Like this:

By REAGAN REESE, CONTRIBUTOR | September 26, 2022

Share this:

Like this:

BY: CASEY CHALK | SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

The New Model Policies

A Personal Anecdote

Protecting Our Children

Share this:

Like this:

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | AUGUST 19, 2022

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

‘Gender-Affirming Care’ Is the Opposite of Gender-Affirming and Caring

BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | AUGUST 19, 2022

Will Proponents Back Down?

Gender-Affirming Care Is a Lie

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Share this:

Like this:

BY: KELSEY BOLAR | AUGUST 10, 2022

‘Coming Out’

Identifying as a Boy

‘Wasn’t Making Her Happy’

‘Going to War Together’

Share this:

Like this:

ERPORTED BY DYLAN HOUSMAN, HEALTHCARE REPORTER | June 15, 2022

Share this:

Like this:

REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JUNE 09, 2022